Stand up for journalism: join a comedy workshop

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There are many initiatives around audience engagement but journalists often seem to be left out of the debate.

To help journalists connect with their audiences and improve the way they talk about the industry, reporter, standup and UCLan researcher Kirsty Styles designed a comedy workshop Stand up for journalism.

"The idea of the programme is to train journalists with some comedy skills to help them improve the way of talking about what they do and why they do it," said Styles.

"Readers often don't see the human behind the article and there are chances that if we use humour, people may start to listen."

Comedy skills may also help journalists with public speaking and explaining complex or sensitive topics in an accessible way.

Similar initiatives work well in academia where comedy training helped researchers talk to audiences and present their work or findings in an engaging way.

The two-hour training will also be an opportunity to test out new ideas and present them to an audience. It will consist of a number of short exercises to get participants thinking and talking about their work as a journalist.

Two weeks later, on 8 May 2019, the participants will give their very own stand-up performance in front of a real audience.

The workshop starts the week of 22 April - dates are to follow. To join the workshop, apply here.