By Taryn Champion

Writing on Freelancewriting.com, EN Jio notes, “Each journalistic form and style uses different techniques and writes for different purposes and audiences.” With that in mind, here are a few highlights on a few journalism genres and what they contain.

Print Journalism

Print Journalism, also known as traditional journalism consists of writing. This type of journalism is not topic and content specific but is defined by the main forms of print, being magazines and newspapers.

Print journalists may be freelancers writing for more than one print publication, or full time reporters. More than not, print Journalists are paired with a photojournalist to enhance their print piece.

Broadcast Journalism

Broadcast journalism consists of television and radio. Unlike that of traditional print journalism, broadcast journalism does not rely on writing skills alone.

“Broadcast Journalists generate ideas and assess the value and accuracy of ideas and information from other sources, before presenting items for consideration by Editors, Commissioners, or other decision makers,” notes Creative Skillset on its website.

Research, reporting and writing copy for news is done behind the scenes in broadcast Journalism in order to prepare for the show. Broadcast journalists behind the scenes like print Journalists do require writing skills. However these skills are enormously different to traditional journalistic skills.

Photojournalism

Photojournalists, unlike everyday photographers are trained to tell a story with their photographs.

This is used to enhance what traditional print journalists put out in the media and is used to emphasis a story. Photojournalists may contribute in writing by adding a caption to their image.

Multimedia Journalism

Multimedia’s extension of more than one medium has allowed for an expansion of journalism.

As multimedia is a platform that has no limits as it caters for print Journalism, broadcast Journalism as well as photojournalism. Due to the Internet having such vast reach and an array of functions which allows for video, imagery and the like, Multimedia Journalism can consist of a written story, videos, photos as well as audio.

Lecturer at the University of California’s Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, Jeremy Rue, writes, “However, we are also seeing a remarkable emergence of startup online-only news organizations that are not confined by a traditional distribution method. In this case, the role of the journalist is being transformed, particularly in respect to the convergence of content-types — or as you put it, the ‘merging’ of video, online and print.”

What are your thoughts on the different genres of journalism? Do you prefer one over the other? Tell us below.