It's hard to feel optimistic about the state of the journalism industry. Trust is in freefall. The business model is broken. And the next generation of journalists needs to master skills that barely existed a decade ago. The people trying to prepare them for all of this are having to reinvent their approach at the same time.

CNN Academy has been training journalists and broadcast affiliates since the 1980s. Its focus has always been craft, but the conversations happening in its classrooms today look very different from those of even five years ago.

"It's not just technical expertise anymore," says Glen Mulcahy, a mobile journalism expert who has been a trainer since 2006 and has spent the last three years with CNN Academy. "It's also the challenges that organisations are grappling with."

Those challenges are considerable. The business model that sustained mainstream journalism for decades has been upended, and AI has accelerated the disruption. But Mulcahy is clear about which crisis worries him more. "Trust is at a historic low," he says. "We can't keep doing what we've always done."

A different kind of journalist

According to Luke Henderson, senior trainer with the CNN Academy, the daily reality of working in a newsroom has changed beyond recognition. Journalists used to begin with a television package, with everything else flowing from that. That logic has inverted. He gives an example of a recent CNN investigation, where the TV package was the last thing produced. The pitch, the digital treatment, and the social video all came first.

"The focus is digital now," says Henderson, adding that journalists need to adapt at every stage, from pitch to execution. They have to think about what social video can be done before they've even started reporting.

For him, the starting point for any story is a question that journalists have always had to ask but now need to answer much earlier.

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