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Thursday, July 28, 2022 at 08:00

Cultural journalism, a specialty for restless minds

El Master in Cultural Journalism and New Trends begins its ninth season at URJC aimed at training students in how to address and report on the most relevant aspects of culture.

Newsroom

Cultural journalism allows reaching the same informative objective that this profession demands but through other paths, seeking the complicity of the public reader, through literary, aesthetic and audiovisual resources. These characteristics turn the cultural journalist into a critic of the scenarios of events, and their audiences into witnesses of imagination and creativity. 

Without critical looks there are no criteria                                                 

It is not true that the public is not interested in cultural information, the problem is that newsrooms often confuse culture with entertainment and mix content without any journalistic rigour. Cultural journalism cannot be conceived as a specialty alien and distant from the deficient and complex situation of culture and education that Spain is currently going through. In short, cultural journalism not only informs, but also trains and specializes future journalists and viewers most interested in these issues. 

Disseminate versus vulgarize 

Cultural journalism is a very extensive and varied social practice. It can be a section of a newspaper or a radio station, it can be a television program or a specialized website; but, in addition, it is a crossroads of genres, trends and styles, a border between knowledge and the entertainment industry, a stage for creativity, for the chronicles of the unstoppable renewal of events where even fictions are relevant. However, one might ask: can cultural journalism be confined to the margins of specialized journalism? Of course, yes, although with very different functions and tasks than other genres. The differential element of specialized journalism is not found so much in the abandonment of generalization, but rather in the continuity and development of the most basic areas that are applied in any discipline or professional activity. 

Cultural journalism: literature under pressure 

Writing "under pressure" means being exposed to the rigors of today, the journalist seeks to make the chaos of reality believable, seeks to tell the truth, although he knows that things are not how they happen but how they are remembered. The chronicler is a necessarily subjective and provisional witness of what happens, but that does not mean that he is no less important because, sometimes, as happens to the historian, he is the only one who is present to see and tell what happens. The journalist knows how to position himself in front of events, he knows how to approach / move away from the facts, his point of view means the gaze through which others observe, he provides the first data that can ultimately be validated, nuanced or discarded. 

What you can't stop learning 

If culture characterizes us and does not abandon us, the Master's Degree in Cultural Journalism and New Trends offers an alternative for professional specialization and creative training through theoretical subjects (The culture market. Research, management and cultural marketing. Audiovisual culture. Intercultural and alternative communication. Art and digital culture); practical subjects (Cultural information on the radio. Culture on television. Cyberculture and digital journalism. data visualization); and workshops (journalistic design. cultural journalism. Creative writing. News and interpretive genres in print and digital media). 

The Master in Cultural Journalism and New Trends starts its tenth season at the Rey Juan Carlos University starting next year.