WASHINGTON D.C. — The Online News Association, the world’s largest membership organization of digital journalists, today announced a $100,000 grant from the Excellence & Ethics in Journalism Foundation (EEJF) to create and aggregate a series of virtual training elements on journalists.org.
The grant will seed ONA’s efforts to develop and disseminate a web-based, searchable resource library that will give journalists around the world access to cutting-edge digital tools, training and strategies and expand benefits for its 2,000-plus members and the journalism community.
By 2014-15, ONA envisions a sophisticated library focused on digital journalism resources easily searchable by topic, synthesizing the tremendous knowledge and innovation cropping up daily in the industry. Training modules can take any format — text, socially curated content, Storify posts, embeddable presentations, audio and video — with an emphasis on interactive and innovative presentation.
The first training to roll out free to ONA members will be “For Journalism,” a series of nine courses focused on data journalism, produced and taught by experts in the field. These step-by-step courses in coding will take a comprehensive approach to teaching how to build news applications. ONA’s partnership with For Journalism will provide every ONA member access for one year to the first series of courses, set to begin in August, and a 50 percent discount to any other courses created during that time.
Future training may include topics such as how to measure and assess the impact of digital reporting; open-source tools; social media; data journalism, visualization and reporting; programming and coding; mapping; building apps and tools; FOIA and other investigative tools; journalism law and ethics; metrics and analytics; user-generated content and crowd-sourcing; design; mobile and tablet customization; collaborative reporting; and experimental tools such as drones.
This is EEJF’s second major grant to ONA; the first comprised $75,000 in funding to redesign its website, journalists.org, which was successfully launched at its 2011 conference.
“We’re grateful to EEJF for its invaluable, continuing support in helping us bring the latest in training to journalists around the world,” said Jane McDonnell, ONA Executive Director.