24 Hours in the Life of a Newsroom - Training Resource

"The foundations of journalism in four collections: seasoned professionals in each media share 24 key moments in their work."

24 Hours in the Life of a Newsroom is a free educational website dedicated to training young journalists from all over the world to international standards. Designed to help young bloggers, journalism students, and journalists just starting out in their careers, it offers close to a hundred educational fact sheets setting out the various stages of the news production process of a radio station, a TV channel, a newspaper, and an online news website.

The sets of fact sheets describe 24 key situations encountered daily by journalists in each media, providing information on widespread techniques, constraints, and practices. As explained by the publishers, these factsheets are not intended to replace training courses leading to qualifications; rather, they are designed to provide backup for the smooth accomplishment of work and as a refresher for certain practices.

Developed by Lille School of Journalism (ESJ Lille) and CFI, the French media development agency, the factsheets have been produced by seasoned professionals with experience in training budding journalists and media professionals. The website has been available since 2013 in nine languages (French, English, Arabic, Chinese, Kiswahili, Indonesian, Burmese, Vietnamese, and Khmer). According to the publishers, each year, a million pages are read, and more than 250,000 people visit the site from France, South-East Asia, Africa, and throughout the world.

In 2021, the authors updated the two collections on web journalism and the written press in order to ensure that the information was still relevant. More recently, a separate Journalism and Elections Handbook was added to the collection, consisting of 15 factsheets.  

The sections are as follows:

Television - Topics include: producing news; conducting a good interview; managing the audio; writing for screen: graphs, headers, and captions; writing the voiceover, and responsible journalism.

Radio - Topics include: the Ws (What? Who? Where? When? Why?), writing for radio, voice training, structuring a bulletin, the running-order sheet, news reporting, vox pops, and major radio principles.

Paper or Printed Press - Topics include: newsroom meetings, commentary, news hierarchy, sources, organisational systems, investigative journalism, writing, proofreading, and the layout.   

The Web - Topics include: Using social media to find news, how to write for reading screen, fact-checking, shooting and editing online video, the basics of data journalism, launching a podcast, protecting data and sources, and the gamification of news.

Journalism and Elections Handbook - This handbook is intended to serve as a source of information and a practical tool for journalists covering elections. It is designed to help them provide comprehensive coverage of the election period as impartially as possible. Relaying the hopes of the people and future decision-makers and publicising the latter's manifestos are the responsibility of the media, who have a key role to play in democracy. Topics include: How to prepare for and host a debate, how to get young people to take an interest in the elections, covering a political rally, covering an election campaign, the main ethical rules to be followed (especially during the election period), and advice for encouraging the participation of women.