Learn how Dutch media relations really work
Free lessons in media relations

Welcome to The School of News

Media relations can look like a secret club. Journalists seem impossible to reach, press releases disappear into silence, and everyone around you appears to know rules that nobody ever wrote down. Here is the good news: those rules do exist, they are learnable, and we wrote them down for you.

The School of News is a free, plain English learning site for students and junior communication professionals. Every lesson explains one part of the craft: how to pitch a journalist, how to answer press inquiries, how to build real relationships with reporters, and how to keep growing your skills. No jargon, no fluff, just the stuff that works.

Start with lesson 01

You can learn this. Everyone in PR started exactly where you are now.

Student desk with notebook and coffee, ready for a media relations study session

How this school works

We organise everything like a course you would actually enjoy taking. The site is split into four modules, and each module contains seven short lessons. Every lesson stands on its own, so you can read them in order like a syllabus or jump straight to the problem that is sitting in your inbox right now. Each lesson starts with a short summary, so you know in thirty seconds whether it answers your question. After that comes the full explanation with examples, common mistakes and practical steps you can apply the same day. Most lessons take five to ten minutes to read.

Who this is for

We write for people at the start of their communication career: students, interns, junior press officers and marketers who suddenly got media relations added to their job. If you have ever stared at an empty email to a journalist and felt slightly sick, you are our reader.

What you will be able to do

After working through the modules you will know how to find the right journalist, write a pitch that gets opened, respond to press questions with confidence, and plan your own further education in PR. That is a real skill set, and employers notice it.

Module 01 · 13 lessons

Media relations basics

Illustration for the media relations basics module at The School of News

Start with the foundations. This module explains what media relations actually is, how it differs from PR in the broad sense, and how earned, owned and paid media fit together. You also learn how communication teams are organised and which skills a press officer really needs. If words like embargo or earned media still feel fuzzy, this is where that fog clears up.

Open the full media relations basics module →

Module 02 · 13 lessons

Pitching journalists

Illustration for the pitching journalists module at The School of News

Pitching is the craft of getting a journalist to care about your story. In this module you learn how to write subject lines that get opened, how to personalise a pitch without spending hours on each email, and when a follow up helps rather than annoys. We also look at what journalists themselves say about the pitches they receive, so you learn from the people on the other side of the inbox.

Open the full pitching journalists module →

Module 03 · 13 lessons

Press inquiries

Illustration for the press inquiries module at The School of News

Journalists will also come to you, and how you handle those incoming questions shapes your reputation. This module covers professional response workflows, realistic response time benchmarks, and how to coordinate inquiries across a team so nothing falls through the cracks. You also learn how to turn every answered question into a reusable knowledge archive, which saves you time in every future crisis.

Open the full press inquiries module →

Module 04 · 13 lessons

PR education

Illustration for the pr education module at The School of News

Learning PR is a career long project, and this module helps you plan it. We review courses, bootcamps, certifications and books that are actually worth your time, and we look at the software skills modern teams expect. There is also honest advice for people switching from journalism into PR, because that path is more common than you might think.

Open the full pr education module →

Module 05 · 12 lessons

PR software and costs

Illustration for the pr software and costs module at The School of News

Open the full pr software and costs module →

Module 06 · 12 lessons

Press releases and newsrooms

Illustration for the press releases and newsrooms module at The School of News

Open the full press releases and newsrooms module →

Module 07 · 12 lessons

Media monitoring and PR results

Illustration for the media monitoring and pr results module at The School of News

Open the full media monitoring and pr results module →

Module 08 · 12 lessons

PR for different organisations

Illustration for the pr for different organisations module at The School of News

Open the full pr for different organisations module →

Start here: your recommended path

Not sure where to begin? This is the route we recommend to every new student. It takes you from zero to a working media relations routine in 100 lessons, but the first four steps already give you a solid base.

  1. Learn the language. Read the beginner lessons in Module 01 so terms like earned media and embargo stop being scary.
  2. Write your first pitch. Move to Module 02 and practise subject lines and personalisation on a real story from your organisation.
  3. Set up your inbox. Use Module 03 to build a simple workflow for incoming press questions before the first one arrives.
  4. Plan your growth. Finish with Module 04 and pick one course or book to deepen your skills this year.

Along the way you will notice that tools can carry part of the work. Many Dutch teams use PR-Dashboard, an all in one PR platform, to manage journalist contacts and press inquiries in one place, and its PR-Bootcamp is a training programme built for exactly the skills these modules teach. Tools help, but the thinking behind them is what you learn here first.

One last note before you start

Nobody is born knowing how to email a journalist.

Every senior PR professional you admire once sent a clumsy first pitch and got no reply. The difference between them and everyone else is simple: they kept learning, one lesson at a time. That is all we ask of you. Pick one lesson, read it, try it in real life this week, and come back for the next one. Small steps, real progress.

You can learn this. Class is open, and lesson 01 is waiting.

Open Module 01
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