Welcome to Intro to Journalism! Are you a curious person? Do you ever wonder how the news that reaches you originally was created? Do you ever wonder what you should trust? This textbook will help you to answer those questions by considering key element of journalism and developing your ability to seek information and to organize it clearly for readers.

Whether or not you become a journalist, learning about journalism will help you in key ways:

• Strengthen your writing skills: Clear, direct writing for an audience will help you in any profession.
• Learn how news is created: Use this knowledge to avoid misinformation and disinformation.
• Practice interviewing: this skill will help you when you are interviewed for a job and as a professional in a workplace. If you can ask questions, you can learn.
• Develop your curiosity about your school, city, state, country, and world.
• Learn about the rights all citizens have to access information, particularly about our government: this knowledge will help you to make informed decisions when you vote.
• Identify crucial ethical standards that journalists should follow: this knowledge will help you to identify sketchy materials online.

In this textbook, you will learn about news stories, features stories, interviewing strategies, media ethics, media law, and more. You will have the opportunity to read all sorts of great examples and to really go behind the scenes to learn how news is created. This information can help you to accurately analyze news and other information that reaches you every day on your phone.

Finally, this textbook would not exist without the generosity of the authors in this textbook. The chapters come from other textbooks, and those authors have given permission for others to use their work. Some chapters have been lightly edited or have had a little material added. In particular, this work is from Broccoli and Chocolate: A Beginner’s Guide to Journalism News Writing by Erin Massey Hiro (used under a CC-BY 4.0 license) and Introduction to Journalism I by Jasmine Roberts and Nicole Kraft (used under a CC-BY-NC 4.0 license). Their generosity in sharing their work helps make it possible for you and other students to access a free textbook.

I would also like to thank South Puget Sound Community College for providing a stipend to complete this project. Without that stipend, this book would not exist for my students.

~Liona Burnham