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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

The idea I floated had to do with word processors and their spellcheck libraries. In Microsoft Word and other software, you can tell the program to “learn” words. Effectively, you’re telling the computer to not put a curvy red line beneath a given word. Examples of this might include a last name you write frequently, the name of a product, or any other word you use often that might not be a real word.

My idea would give word processors the ability to do just the opposite: forget words.

If a word is forgotten, the program would automatically put the red line below the word, regardless of whether or not it is misspelled. Why would you want to do this? Read on, friends.

The following situation may seem slightly farfetched, but I’m certain it’s plausible. In addition, there are other, more likely examples, but as I’ve personally experienced one of them, I’d rather not share it. WARNING: Potty language is upcoming.

Let’s say you’re a copywriter for an ad agency, You’re working on an ad for a new energy drink, and the idea behind the project is that it’s not for the faint (of heart.) In your copy, you write the following – Energy Drink: Not for the faint.

Except you don’t.

See, the t and f letters are in close proximity on your standard keyboard. You mistakenly write taint, not faint. The word processor reads taint as correctly spelled, thinking of the verb that means to skew or otherwise negatively adjust. Your boss, however, reads the word taint as a slang term for a certain rarely-seen part of the male body.

Ouch. But if you had told the computer to automatically highlight taint, you would have been much more likely to catch the mistake in the editing process. You’d have saved yourself from a pretty big embarassment.

I know there are likely a million flaws or with this idea (or better fixes, like, uh, improving your editing.) But we all make stupid mistakes – I have to think this would help avoid a few of them. Am I crazy?

By the way, I wrote nearly this entire post on a Blackberry via WordPress’ new mobile software. Stuff is awesome.

Back in MN, cypress mulch is my life.

I finally made it back to good old Minnesota earlier this week, and it’s been a great change-up from the city life of D.C. A little different to be out working in the yard rather than spending every working hour in front of a computer, but I should be able to handle it.

Since I’ve gotten back, though, I’ve already had a pair of conversations with friends from home who don’t use Twitter, and don’t understand why it’s useful. I’ve tried to explain how Twitter can be used for great professional benefit, rather than the more personal benefit that Facebook offers, but I haven’t gotten a great response. I’m confident that if everyone gave Twitter a try (and used it correctly), they’d see the value. But being back in Minneapolis makes me wonder if some people just aren’t cut out for it.

That said, everyone I follow these days is journalism/web/D.C.-based. Anyone know of any good Minneapolis people, businesses or organizations to follow?

But even as Twitter links to local media’s video and photos came in droves, the more interesting part of the whole situation wasn’t how Twitter directed viewers to other coverage in mainstream media sites. Rather, the most remarkable part for me was the amount of public service tweeting going on. Has that term been coined yet? I’ll take credit for now.

Even the rarest D.C.-based tweeters in my list of followers were spreading the word: Stay away from the Metro. It seems to me that Twitter was being used to ensure that people knew what had happened, not just for their own knowledge, but to keep people out of the Metro system and make sure a bad situation didn’t get worse. I guess I can’t be certain what each person’s intentions were, but that’s what it looked like to me.

Have there been other notable instances of public service tweeting? I’m sure I missed one. Point it out if you know of any.

Used under a Creative Commoms license via Gary Hayes

That was the question du jour at the Poynter chat I attended today. I hadn’t participated in one before today, but when I heard about it (via Twitter, of course), it seemed like it’d be a gathering of the top young minds talking about Twitter, Facebook, and the like. It was.

There were plenty of good points made, but guest host Greg Linch had an interesting answer to the one question I asked: With Twitter taking over as the premier social network, how can you still use Facebook to your benefit?

Says Greg:

I think Facebook is still very relevant, but for different reasons. I don’t find it nearly as useful as Twitter on a day-to-day basis, but I think it’s an important long-term tool for keeping in touch with friends and longer-form communication.

A good point indeed. Facebook is the primary way I keep in touch with friends from across the country, and my Twitter habits are much more professionally-based. It does beg the question, though: If Facebook is more of a personal-life app, then what’s the point of a newspaper (or other company) having a fan page? I get my news via Twitter/RSS – an additional redundancy seems a little much.

As for how much is too much, I gotta think it varies person to person. If it distracts you or in any way prevents you from accomplishing your goals in the analog world, then it’s no good. But used as a proper digital tool, it should actually be a boost for professional/personal productivity and advancement. Agreed?

Probably not what most old school newspaper execs want to hear, but this piece has some pretty salient points. Among them:

• When will these guys learn that paid content is not the way to go? People have gotten news free of charge on the ‘net for more than 10 years. They aren’t about to stop.
• This one is probably the most difficult one to swallow for many in the biz: “Quality journalism is expensive, and to the extent that it provides a public good, we will find ways to fund it. But top-heavy, poorly run, arrogant-to-the-bitter-end media companies? This is their crisis, not our crisis, and it certainly isn’t about journalism.”

The media landscape is changing (rocket science, I know). I am very confident that in the end, we’ll still get our news – and it’ll be well done. But it’s not going to look like it used to. Whatever newspaper execs used to make, whatever the business model used to look like – they’re not going to make that much and it’s not going to look like that. The sooner the people in charge stop trying to salvage what’s on the way out and just embrace what’s coming, the better they – and we – will be.