Journalism Resume Examples to Help You Succeed This Year

Important Elements for Journalism Resumes

High-quality communication skills are important to remember as you write your journalism resume. As a journalist, you must communicate in written and spoken English. A hiring manager will likely pass you over if your resume has typos, poor grammar, or clunky wording.

Next, you’ll want to add the correct information in each section of your resume, as noted in the following paragraphs.

Resume summary or objective

At the top of your resume, you should have a two- to three--3 sentence paragraph highlighting your most important skills, education and achievements. If you have more than 10 years of experience, this paragraph should be your resume summary, highlighting your achievements and experience. If you have less experience, this paragraph should be your resume objective, emphasizing your skills and education and indicating a goal you want to accomplish in your career.

Skills

A robust skills section can help you highlight your most important skills to the hiring manager. Remember that you need both soft skills and hard skills to be a journalist, so you should incorporate both. Here are a few bullet points of relevant skills to get you started:

• Microsoft Office proficiency
• fAdobe Photoshop knowledge
• Writing breaking news stories
• Time management
• Copy editing and proofreading
• Fact-checking stories
• Coming up with story ideas
• Staying up to date with current events
• General content writing

Remember to look through the job description before writing down your list of skills, so you know what skills the hiring manager is looking for. You can also look at journalism resume samples at ResumeNerd.

Work experience

You can list up to 10 years of experience in your work history section. Include any information as a writer, editor, or any other related job. If you’re entirely new to the field, you can include experiences you gained in high school or college or from internships you held.

Education

You’ll need a bachelor’s degree to pursue a journalism job. It’s common for people to pursue a degree like the Bachelor of Arts in Mass Communication and Media, which can give you an understanding of the realm of mass communication in general. Steer clear of listing your GPA and instead list other honors, like a cum laude or Dean's List, in your education section.

Certifications

If you’re a member of professional associations, you can include this in your certifications section. Include any association with the Society of Professional Journalists or other journalism organizations.