Get Training to Transform Your Media Outlet

Learning means staying active. It means nurturing your curiosity and refusing to get stuck in a rut because of a degree, experience, or job title. I believe that we all need to learn throughout our careers, not just at the beginning. It’s a necessity, and that’s precisely why it’s also a right: a legal obligation, enshrined in the Labor Code, for every employer. But this right faces its own limitations. Access to it remains marked by inequalities based on gender, age, nationality, or a person’s level of qualifications.

In the media world, training is just as essential. First and foremost, to keep up with the times and current trends. But it’s also crucial when launching or growing your own media outlet. Having a clear editorial vision is essential. Skills in law, administration, recruitment, management, and technical areas are just as important.

The good news: you can learn how to start a media outlet and keep it going. In fact, it’s something you have to learn! Because it’s a real necessity, not just a luxury to make your resume look good; because it allows you to become part of a community and move beyond a self-centered entrepreneurial approach; and because learning is a long-term process. It means giving yourself the tools to grow and help your project evolve over time.  

You don’t need to be an expert in everything right away, just as hands-on experience alone never provides a complete picture of the project we want to carry out. You’ll need time, enthusiasm, and sometimes sufficient resources to build a media project under the best possible conditions. From YouTube videos to incubation programs lasting several months, the solutions are diverse and varied and can be tailored to your specific needs. 

On the Need for Training 

Nothing can ever be taken for granted. A profession evolves, as do its tools, and staying up to date is essential, no matter the industry. And that, I think, is what makes it exciting: we’re never limited to the profession we started out in. Faced with a skills gap, organizations are faced with a question: should they look for those skills externally through recruitment, or develop them in the people they already have? 

In an article on vocational training, the Jean Jaurès Foundation asks: “Why not consider updating the skills of a company’s employees, so they can acquire new expertise and refresh the skills they already have? ” Training rather than hiring means valuing what current employees already bring to the table, rather than pitting them against an outside candidate who is supposedly ‘ready to work.’ Knowledge of the field, the team, and the project has its own intrinsic value that cannot be simply imported from elsewhere. 

Learning is also a way to learn from others: a newsletter, a video tutorial, a specialized podcast, a free masterclass, or more structured formats like a short course, a long-term program, or an incubation program. No matter the format, there’s always some form of knowledge sharing involved. 

I strongly believe in the idea of learning from one another—sharing what we know and our doubts—rather than learning in isolation. In fact, we often make better progress when we work together—whether across companies with peers or other project leaders, or within our own companies with our team, trainers, and industry experts. Learning together gives us the opportunity to raise questions we wouldn’t have asked ourselves alone. Working as a team starts right there!

I also believe that training is necessary to gain some perspective on your project. We often have our heads down, caught up in the urgency of securing funding, getting our show out on time, and staying the course no matter what. In our training programs, designed for project leaders and executives, one question comes up often—the very question we ask them even before they join a cohort: Why now? Training means being willing to slow down for a moment so you can move forward more effectively afterward.

That said, training alone isn’t enough to solve everything. A complicated political, social, or economic context cannot be offset by good training, no matter how effective it may be. Training gives us the tools to take action on the things within our control—but not on the rest.

And in the media?

In the media, this necessity is evident every day. Tools change, formats change, and the way we engage with our audience is constantly evolving: simply staying informed isn’t enough—we must also adapt, or we risk falling behind changes that won’t wait for us.

This is the case with generative AI, which has become firmly established in newsrooms: According to Cision’s latest State of the Media survey, conducted among nearly 1,900 journalists in 19 countries, 79% of them now use it, compared to 53% a year earlier. Live journalism, immersive podcasts, and social media-native formats are reshaping the way stories are told. And the audience itself is shifting: according to the Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report 2026, a majority of people now get their news primarily through platforms rather than from media outlets themselves.

In practical terms, educating yourself can mean reading, following, subscribing, and watching. Reports—such as the Digital News Report—on online news consumption habits. Or those from the Knight Foundation and FT Strategies on how younger generations consume media. YouTube videos, podcasts like RFI’s “Atelier des médias,” and shows like “Arrêt sur images,” which examine how the media covers the news. Key voices in media monitoring: Jean Abbiateci, founder of the Bulletin newsletter and former deputy editor-in-chief of Le Temps and Heidi.news in Switzerland; Maxime Loisel, a media consultant who tracks digital innovations in the media. Specialized newsletters: those from Médianes(obviously), Splice, or the Nieman Lab… Just staying informed isn’t enough—you also have to put it into practice!

Learning also means taking the time to look at what’s being done elsewhere—outside France or outside the industry—to draw inspiration from it. And, to take it even further, there are training programs: short-term, long-term, incubation-based, hybrid, in-person, or online. There are many ways to learn. 

Learning alongside peers is also a great way to grow together. At [company name]Médianes, this takes the form of a 30-minute session on Mondays, covering topics that impact our daily lives: creating a print publication, building a business model, defining KPI metrics, as well as refining our editorial processes and honing our public speaking skills. Anyone can suggest a topic, and the person with expertise in that area leads the session.

In addition, we hold a weekly roundup to share and discuss topics that have caught our attention. It’s a great way to learn together, step outside our filter bubbles… and discover what our colleagues are interested in!

One question remains when it comes to training: funding. Solutions exist, depending on individual circumstances. Here are a few: Employees should contact their OPCO (corporate skills operator), which covers part or all of the cost of training, depending on the sector. Freelance journalists can apply to the AFDAS freelance fund. Job seekers can turn to France Travail. Those with editorial projects can apply for grants such as those offered by SCAM. And other self-employed individuals can turn to their training insurance fund. However, you need to be aware of these options and plan ahead.

From creating a media outlet to managing it: no one knows how to do everything right from the start

Journalism schools teach ethics, how to find the right angle, and audience engagement strategies—in short, how to do a good job in the media. They rarely teach how to start a media outlet.

And yet, no one knows how to do everything right from the start. Creating a media outlet means learning to think of it as a whole, beyond one’s original field of expertise. On the one hand, there are support functions—management, HR, and administration—which are all too often relegated to the bottom of the priority list, even though they’re essential to the project’s viability. These aren’t innate skills. What if, instead of becoming a manager or leader by default, we trained ourselves to be one?

On the other hand, the editorial itself, which benefits from not being isolated from the rest. If you know us a little, you’ve probably already heard us talk about the “product vision”: that’s what we advocate at [company name]Médianes—fostering dialogue between editorial, design, marketing, and technology, rather than compartmentalizing them. Learning about the fields surrounding your core profession—rather than focusing solely on it—gives you the keys to your own independence.

We try to put this vision into practice in everything we do, starting with our training programs: Créer un média, which lays the groundwork for a project and helps build a media outlet that lasts, and the Programme Médianes, which helps consolidate and scale up. Two training programs designed to help tackle together the challenges that independent media outlets often face alone.

Each of these two training programs covers everything you need to know to sustain a media outlet over the long term in a viable way. After four sessions each, and having supported more than 62 project leaders, one insight has been confirmed: there is a real need for spaces where people can come together and learn as a group.

We’re trying to do the same thing in journalism schools, where we teach a course called “Creating a Media Outlet”: to show that it’s not out of reach, as long as you take the initiative in these areas—either on your own or with others.

So yes, it is possible to transition from journalist to accounting expert—provided you get the right training. We believe this is one of the most practical ways to move forward, and that in a sector that changes as quickly as the media, it counts double. Whenever possible, we prefer to do this together. That’s what we’re trying to build, course by course, with those who join us.

To go further

• Foster collaboration between editorial, design, marketing, and technical teams rather than keeping them siloed: how to develop a strong product strategy within your media organization.
• Learning about project management also starts with the right resources: our guide to project management in newsrooms, and our interview with its author, Robin Kwong, who oversees subscriber engagement strategy at The Wall Street Journal.
• A resource for further reading: our consulting firm’s expertise in management and project management.
• Want to delve deeper into the English-speaking world? The News Product Alliance has published a primer and reference resources for product management in the media: *The ABCs of Product*.
• Project management remains a blind spot for many newsrooms, even though it determines how work flows and is coordinated: here are three resources to help change that.