How Do Journalists Learn?

Outside of on-the-job experience, where do journalists learn about the complexities that inform the easy and cheap stories? Where do they learn about not-for-profit organizations? Responding to that question, a journalist from our more rural focus group had this to say:

"I went to journalism school and I don't recall anything in that system...about coverage of not-for-profit organizations."

Another journalist in the same focus group confirmed the only logical source remaining:

"Getting to know them [not-for-profits]? Just [through] general knowledge, through living. They way we cover them at my newspaper is basically: if they are local, if they are bigger organizations, [like] March of Dimes and those kinds of things. If they are actually coming into our community and doing a fund raiser or maybe perhaps a person in the community is gaining something, getting help from them, local nonprofits, we would cover them probably a little bit more."

Seattle University Journalism Professor Gary Atkins, an advisor for Good News/Good Deeds, told us that, to his knowledge, quality materials do not exist for teaching future journalists about the not-for-profit sector. Learning about the sector is, in his opinion, limited to learning how to read the form 990 that the Internal Revenue Service requires not-for-profits to file. That is a problem for the community sector and for the citizens the sector serves.