Yes, journalists should learn how to program. No, not every journalist should learn it right now — just those who want to stay in the industry for another ten years. More seriously, programming skills and knowledge enable us traditional journalists to tell better and more engaging stories.
Programming means going beyond learning some HTML. I mean real computer programming.
As a journalist, I’m fully aware of the reasons why we don’t learn programming — and I’m guilty of using many of them. I initially thought there were good reasons not to take it up:
- Learning to program is time-consuming. One look at the thick books full of arcane code and you remember why you became a journalist and not a mathematician or an engineer. Even if you are mathematically inclined, it’s tough to find the time to learn all that stuff.
- Your colleagues tell you you don’t need it — including the professional developers on staff. After all, it took them years of study and practice to become really good developers and web designers, just like it takes years for a journalist to become experienced and knowledgeable. (And, if you start trying to code, the pros on staff are the ones who’ll have to clean up any mess you make.)
- Learning the basics takes time, as does keeping your skills up to date. The tools change all the time. Should you still bother to learn ActionScript (Flash), or just go for HTML5? Are you sure you want to study PHP and not Python?
- Why learn programming when there are so many free, ready-made tools online: Quizzes, polls, blogs, mind maps, forums, chat tools, etc. You can even use things like Yahoo Pipes to build data mashups without needing any code.
- When Megan Taylor wrote for MediaShift about the programmer-journalist, she asked around for the perfect skillset. One response nearly convinced me to never think about programming ever again: “Brian Boyer, a graduate of Medill’s journalism for programmers master’s track and now News Applications Editor at the Chicago Tribune, responded with this list: XHTML / CSS / JavaScript / jQuery / Python / Django / xml / regex / Postgres / PostGIS / QGIS.”
Those are some of the reasons why I thought I could avoid learning programming. But I was so wrong.
Why Journalists Should Program
You’ve heard the reasons not to start coding. Now here’s a list of reasons why you should:
- Every year, the digital universe around us becomes deeper and more complex. Companies, governments, organizations and individuals are constantly putting more data online: Text, videos, audio files, animations, statistics, news reports, chatter on social networks…Can professional communicators such as journalists really do their job without learning how the digital world works?
- Data are going mobile and are increasingly geo-located. As a result, they tell the stories of particular neighborhoods and streets and can be used to tell stories that matter in the lives of your community members.
- People have less time, and that makes it harder to grab their attention. It’s essential to look for new narrative structures. Programming enables you to get interactive and tell non-linear stories.
- You don’t have to build everything from scratch. Let’s take JavaScript, which is used for creating dynamic websites. Tools such as jQuery, a cross-browser JavaScript library, enable people to create interactivity with less effort. Web application frameworks such as Ruby on Rails and Django support the development of dynamic sites and applications. So it can be easier than you thought.
A Way of Looking At the World
Maybe you’re not yet convinced. Even though jQuery makes your life easier, you still need a decent knowledge of JavaScript, CSS and HTML. Django won’t help you if you never practiced Python. All of this takes time, and maybe you’ll never find enough of it to get good at all this stuff.
Still, we must try. The good news is that it doesn’t matter if you become proficient at the latest language. What is important, however, is that you’re able to comprehend the underpinnings of programming and interactivity — to be able to look at the world with a coder’s point of view.
I’m still just a beginner, but I feel that this perspective provides you with an acute awareness of data. You start looking for data structures, for ways to manipulate data (in a good sense) to make them work for your community.
When covering a story, you’ll think in terms of data and interactivity from the very start and see how they can become part of the narrative. You’ll see data everywhere — from the kind that floats in the air thanks to augmented reality, to the more mundane version contained in endless streams of status updates. Rather than being intimidated by the enormous amount of data, you’ll see opportunities — new ways to bring news and information to the community.
You probably won’t have time to actually do a lot of the programming and data structuring yourself. But now you’re equipped to have a valuable and impactful conversation with your geek colleagues. A conversation that gets better results than ever before.
So, even though it’s probably a bit late for me to attend the new joint Master of Science degree program in Computer Science and Journalism at Columbia University, I can still learn How to Think Like a Computer Scientist using the the free MIT OpenCourseWare, take part in the Journalists/Coders Ning network, and find help at Help.HacksHackers.Com).
And so can you.
******
Are you a journalist who has taken up programming? A programmer with advice for journalists? Please share your experiences and insights in the comments.
Roland Legrand is in charge of Internet and new media at Mediafin, the publisher of leading Belgian business newspapers De Tijd and L’Echo. He studied applied economics and philosophy. After a brief teaching experience, he became a financial journalist working for the Belgian wire service Belga and subsequently for Mediafin. He works in Brussels, and lives in Antwerp with his wife Liesbeth.
View Comments (48)
Great post.
I hope this advice is incorporated in undergrad courses and informs extension college programs as well.
But how technically sophisticated need to be?
In my view, the goal for a journalist should be to acquire enough skills to accomplish this:
Solid graphic design skills that will allow you customize the look of your page, create art of the fly.
Video and photo editing.
Enough HTML, CSS etc., skills to be able manipulate a page;for instance, take Word Press and redesign the page layout and customize and fix problems.
The goal isn't to be a professional Web designer, but to have enough capability to do some basic things and do them well.
You don't need a computer science degree and journalism degree, and, in truth, a lot of journalists have serious eye glaze issues when it comes to the underlying math skills involved with programming.
The goal of training should be to develop a practical set of skills and ability to work with the tools that help short-cut some of the pain.
This is a good post and a good discussion.
I have two things to add. I was teaching computer productivity tools when CD ROMs and interactive programs like Director and Authorware were "hot." I volunteered to learn multimedia, and found that as I used Authorware, I needed to learn to program it, as well as use it as an authoring tool. As a person with a degree in education orginallly, this took time and effort. I still remember the thrill of dreaming about the code I needed to complete a particular interactive sequence. And then BOOM. Along came Mosaic, the Web, HTML, and who needed interactive CD-ROMs anymore?
I can't say that learning to code in Authorware, or learning HTML, or CSS has made me rich or thinner. However, coming to understand the logic of programming and how a rush of chaotic information might be systematized into a dataset has helped me in my job as a teacher, consultant, and journalist almost every day.
What I am saying, is that I agree with all the commentors who say you just need to get a feel for programming to become an effective journalist today.
I'm frequently asked this question, and my answer is always the same:
1) You don't need to learn to program, but it certainly couldn't hurt -- for all the reasons cited above. It's not as if this is zero-sum. If you feel it's important, you'll find time. I'm sure if you looked hard there would be something in your life you could give up in order to find time.
2) As a journalist, I've never regretted any skill I've learned -- technical or otherwise. Every one has made me a better reporter. Try it.
3) Many of you are saying roughly the same thing -- that journalists really need to just understand what's possible on the web. My question: Without a fundamental understanding of how the web works, how those building blocks fit together, how do you know "what's possible?" How does a journalist with a minimal understanding of technology, web standards, UI/UX know "what's possible?" Or maybe I should ask, what's the best way to learn these things? I'd say hands-on, but maybe others have a different perspective.
There are many benefits, and very few drawbacks, to learning technical skills as a journalist. No one says you need to become a rock star developer. But knowing your way around some code, understanding how all the building blocks *really* fit together, and adding a few new skills to your reporter's utility belt sure feels like a win, win, win to me.
It shouldn't hurt to learn some programming, but if you learned some programming, you will have almost no more time more for writing.
And.... there are many programmers out there. What happens if they all learn to write?
You will loose your job!
But seriously... these are two different disciplines and hard to combine (IMHO)
A journalist should learn some programming for the same reason that a scientist should learn some statistics and an engineer should learn to write. This doesn't make the scientist a statistician, and it doesn't make the engineer a writer: it simply makes both of them better at their jobs.
Part of the debate hinges on your chosen definition of "learn to program". There are worlds of difference between learning about fundamental concepts like sequence, choice, iteration, decomposition, encapsulation, and information hiding, and teaching yourself how to hack together the code to solve a problem. If you do not understand these fundamental principles (and quite a few more besides) you are not really a programmer, because a programmer is somebody who can identify where such principles can and should be applied, and apply them in any programming language and development environment.
Programming also involves detailed problem analysis, creative problem-solving, rigorous testing, and the ability to find and correct errors (bugs). None of these are easy things to do, and all of them require skill and experience to do well.
So, if you learn Java (or Python, or PHP, or Ruby, or C#, or ...), or even if you learn to program in Java (or Python, or PHP, or Ruby, or C#, or ...), that does not make you a programmer. Any more than learning when to use a two-tailed t-test, and how to conduct one, makes you a statistician, or learning when and how to use a semi-colon makes you a writer.
However, learning how to solve simple (and not so simple) problems using Java (or Python, or PHP, or Ruby, or C#, or ...) may well make you more productive, and puts you in a better position to appreciate what is, and is not, achievable. At the very least you should be better equipped to spot when other people are making excuses or bullshitting. And who knows, you may discover you have a talent for programming and learn some of the more transferrable skills as well.
Yes, journalists should learn to program!! Thanks for posting this! :-)
Perhaps this sort of thing will become a pre-requisite for journalists entering newsrooms in the future as yet another wave of ghastly cost-cutting emerges. Obviously it's handy to know your way around a computer to a certain extent, but computer programmers with real degrees and knowledge and experience in the area should probably be left at it.
Thank you very much to share this information. It is very useful and informative.
mlm software
I'm a student on the Interactive MA at City University where we learn loads of the basics of data journalism. Despite having no real background in coding it quickly became clear that you really need to get to grips with it to do data journalism well.
I have tried to teach myself the basics of a few coding languages so I can scrape data - although it is relatively intimidating at first, it quickly becomes fun. It also, as you say, changes the way that you look at the world. You start seeing potential stories in places that you would not have touched before and that, simply put, is really quite exciting.
Journalists need to learn to program if they want to be able to write about programming. This is not a bad thing, and there is no such thing as bad knowledge. A journalist should learn how to do anything he wants to be able to do.
But does a journalist NEED to be able to program? No, of course not. Not now, and not ten years from now. It's silly.