Should journalists learn programming?

July 22, 2010 | Journalism, Programming | 3 Comments

There’s been considerable debate over the last couple of weeks about whether journalists should learn programming techniques and languages. Poynter hosted a chat on the subject, 10000Words put together a handy flowchart and others have joined the discussion.

On Tuesday, Andrew Nacin dropped my name as someone who falls on the yes-you-should-learn-programming-end-of-the-spectrum. While I appreciate Nacin’s mentioning me as a “living case study,” I do not think it’s necessary for today’s journalist to learn to program.

Before I explain why, let’s look at reasons you should learn to program. First, as MediaShift alludes to, we don’t really know what the media landscape will look like in 10 years. Is it possible that some level of programming will be folded into the standard responsibilities of the average journalist by that point? Maybe, though I doubt it. Second, it may provide you new career opportunities. Plenty of news organizations are starting to experiment with heaps of data and geo-location and the like, and being able to think journalistically while sifting through gigabytes of information may be your ticket to a cool new gig. And of course, the proverbial “why not?” reasoning. If you want to use your time to learn PHP or Ruby (or the WordPress Loop), be my guest. Just recognize it’s not for everyone.

Those points notwithstanding, programming simply is not a necessary (or useful) skill for today’s average journalist. Notice I did not say that programming is not a useful skill on its own; of course it is. The fact is, however, that programming requires too much time and energy to learn, while not providing an outlet for journalists to regularly use the knowledge. Sure, Brian Boyer and Matt Waite are make their living building awesome news applications. It’s just that not everyone can grow up to be them. The cops beat reporter in any city, USA should be cultivating sources, traversing the city, exposing corruption, and producing front page stories (and multimedia packages, maybe!), and that takes time and effort. For the good of the public and the reporter, these goals should trump those of learning to program.

Sure, that cops reporter could have a great idea for web application that automatically maps a location on a landing page when the local police or fire department tweets about an incident. But rather than having to build it all by him or herself, that’s a project to be tackled in conjunction with a dedicated developer. Those guys with the snarky T-shirts and binary jokes? Give them something to do. No need to steal their jobs. In this era of multitasking and convergence, it seems like people (and especially young journalists) are encouraged to learn how to do everything, and while initiative is good, that’s the wrong sentiment. Writers will produce the best written word, photographers will snap the best pictures, and programmers will build the best apps. That’s not going to change, so don’t give up being awesome at something so you can be insufficient at a lot of things.*

In short, if you want to be a programmer and build things, learn to program. If you want your byline on A1 tomorrow morning, focus on getting better at what it is you really want to do.

*Yes, with layoffs and the like, sometimes you will have to be the reporter and the photographer. But, that only works if you’re good enough to tackle both responsibilities, and you might not be if you spread yourself too thin with extraneous forays into too many sectors of the media industry.

Tags: , , , , , , , ,

Three small ways to make life easier using Google products

May 24, 2010 | Lifehacking | No Comments

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last five years or are a Bing or Yahoo employee, you’re probably plugged into the Google cloud one way or another. Some only do GMail, some do GMail and Docs, and some to GMail, Docs, Calendar, Reader, Wave, Labs, News, and pretty much anything that will shove them further under the oversight of our Google overlords. (Just kidding.)

While there is certainly reason to have some concern about being too plugged into the cloud – downtime, security, and personal data sharing come to mind – spending most of your web time with some Google-based window open in front of you can have its benefits. In particular, I put a creative twist on using Google applications to make my life easier in three ways.

Using drafts as a to-do list

Everyone needs a to-do list. Some are more old-school and use a real-world pen and paper, but going digital certainly works better for me. I need one that’s Internet-based – one that I can access from anywhere. The problem? A lot of online task managers (like Remember The Milk) have too many moving parts for what I need. I don’t require a place to perfectly categorize each task, note its expected duration, or include a due date. Quite simply, I just want somewhere that I can jot down some text quickly and access it even quicker.

The solution? GMail drafts. I have one draft with the subject of “To do” that I continually update with tasks for the day and week. Because I almost always have a GMail window open, it takes no time to call up the draft and remember what I need to accomplish. Simple and sufficient.

Tracking what you track with Google Docs

Tracking is all the rage. Whatever you may track – for me, it’s what I eat – tracking on a computer will certainly give you the best opportunity analyze your data at a later date and draw useful conclusions. Again, however, it’s useful to have access to your data at more than one location, so you can both update and check your tracker at any point.

Google Docs gets the job done here. Set up a nice spreadsheet (complete with formulas for addition and averages, if you like) and you’ve got a no-frills place to track your data that’s available anywhere.

Organize your Inbox Zero

The ‘Getting Things Done‘ religion of productivity has been on the rise for some time now, and the concept of Inbox Zero is probably the most famous component of the practice. The concept is simple: by acting on your e-mail when you receive it (responding, deleting, archiving, saving for later, etc.), you encourage movement on tasks and prevent the piling up of deadlines and to-dos.

Following Inbox Zero (which is the child of Merlin Mann’s 43 Folders) essentially turns your inbox into a to-do list, which can be quite useful, with one drawback: what to do when you’ve completed a task, but need response from another party for the project. You could leave it in your inbox so as not to forget about it and let it clutter up your otherwise clean list, or you could archive it to signify its completeness and risk forgetting you need some type of response from someone else.

The GMail fix? Use multiple inboxes, a GMail labs option that allows users to see multiple lists of e-mail in the same window. Simply create a “needs reply” label for those messages that for which you need a response, and set up a second inbox list that displays any messages with the “needs reply” label. Then you can archive the message, removing it from your main inbox (and de facto to-do list) while keeping it visible in your secondary list.

Tags: , , , , ,

Comments vs. retweets

October 29, 2009 | Journalism, Social Media | 2 Comments

Since we expanded The Hatchet’s social media presence and redesigned the blogs earlier this year, we’ve seen a fairly marked drop in comments. But we’ve increased our blogging four-fold. So, what gives?

The culprit seems to be a large bump in retweets. No stats for you, but those are clearly way up, and will continue to increase as more of our readers join the Twitterverse. Our new blog design, too, may be pushing readers to tweet rather than comment, as we’ve added the flashy green retweet button, and relegated the comments button to the plain old gray text.

The real question is this: does it matter? Is a bump in retweets a fair trade for a dearth of comments? While its pretty close to a wash, I’d say it’s no problem. Readers have the ability to squeeze in a short comment before the RT in their tweet, and the retweets clearly get our product out to more people – a fundamental goal. And if more people are reading, there is a better chance for a good number of comments anyway.

The problem is that it’s tough to tell how many of our readers have the chance to retweet. Twitter is exploding – especially on campus – but its probably fair to say that a large majority of students and other GW community members don’t have twitter and thus won’t retweet. Of course, everyone can comment – and if we’re lowering the chance they will by featuring the retweet button instead of the comment button, are we shooting ourselves in the foot? Maybe.

Incidentally, I asked this same question in a forum over at Wired Journalists. If you’re a journalist, you should check that site out.

Tags: , ,

The journalist’s diet

September 14, 2009 | Uncategorized | 2 Comments

We’re about six-ish issues into the year, and unfortunately, one of the biggest things on my mind each production night doesn’t even really relate to the paper. Rather, it relates to me, and what I eat.

I’m finding it very difficult to eat well on the job, and unfortunately for my body, I’m on the job nearly all the time. I really need to find a way to prepare food ahead of time and bring it in to work, so that I don’t have to order in so much.

Clearly, the paper is the biggest part of my life right now. Still, my health is important to me, and so it’s got to be something that I work on. Anyone in the biz have good tips on eating well while on the job?

Tags: ,

As time goes by

August 18, 2009 | Lifehacking, Uncategorized | 1 Comment

WHERE HAS THE TIME GONE.

I’m leaving on a jet plane, back to the District on Thursday. I couldn’t be more excited to get back to school, start really cracking over at The Hatchet, and work my senior year to its fullest, but I do wonder what happened to the last seven weeks I spent in Minnesota.

It would have been hard to ask for a much better short-term summer break – a trip to Arizona, plenty of relaxation, cutting a few strokes off my golf handicap – but I’d be lying if I said I felt like I accomplished everything I wanted to this summer. I had hoped that my time in the midwest would be a digital retreat of sorts – where I would get up to speed and learn everything I could ever need to know about journalism and the web and social media and the like.

That didn’t happen.

In fact, when I make a list of the things I still need to catch up with, it’s a list much longer than I’d like:

  • Figure out how to really use LinkedIn
  • Figure what Publish2 really is and how I can use it personally and for The Hatchet
  • Learn how to code in Javascript
  • Write posts here much more frequently
  • Complete roughly six thousand more minor tasks for The Hatchet
  • Record some music
  • Practice my video and still photography skills
  • Write a particularly important post I’ve been saving up that is essentially the mission statement of this blog.
  • Many more tasks that has wasted away into oblivion

Maybe it hasn’t been so bad. Actually, it hasn’t – it’s been great. But when you follow [read: try to learn from] so many smart people who seem light years ahead, it’s hard not to feel a little lazy.

Here’s to picking up the slack.