Bitten by the Web design bug

Last July, I got a little nostalgic for some good, old-fashioned personal blogging. That is, writing however much I wanted on whatever topic I wanted – public importance be damned. I had run a little brain-dump blog back in high school (the URL of which shall remain hidden for the time being,) and Iwanted another webspace that would allow me to shoot out 600 words a week on whatever came across my sometimes overactive brain.

Really, I just wanted to write. I had done far, far more editing in the last 18 months at The Hatchet than original writing, and my new gig with POLITICO was going swimmingly, but didn’t allow for a writing anything longer than a caption. So, I made a Tumblr. As you can see by the first post, it was supposed to be the happy medium between my 140-character tweets and longer, professionally-themed posts here on WordPress. I had a few nice entries, with a marginally-witty post here and a good reflection there.

Then,they became a little less frequent. Then, a little less. Then, nothing.

I’m a little disappointed that I stopped writing and let never really let my Tumblr get off the ground. But I didn’t stop writing because I decided to sit around and be lazy with my free time instead of using my creative outlet. No, I found a new skill to work on.

Coding.

I’m not programming yet (though I’m trying to learn if you want to help teach me,) but over the last few months I’ve really taken an Olympic leap into Web design and site-building. Sometime next month I will close the book on my seventh site of 2010 (note to self: update your portfolio.) At the beginning of this year, saying that I’d build seven websites from scratch in the next 12 months would have been high comedy. I’m proud of what I’ve done (and eager to learn more and get better every day) but there have been a couple moments where I’ve wondered if I my time could be better spent.

See, I’m a journalist. A writer, you know. Someone who crafts messages with the written word. I don’t do design. I don’t do code. I didn’t major in computer science. I like technology, but I’m not a web geek, right? Right? RIGHT?!?!

At this point, who knows? I’ve always thought of myself as first and foremost a writer, but I spent most of my day off yesterday learning about how to build and utilize custom post types and child themes instead of reading the latest top stories and honing my interviewing or reporting skills. If POLITICO came to me tomorrow and said, “Alex, you’ve got your pick: Want to be the next Senate reporter or our newest web designer?” I’m not sure which I’d choose.

Okay, that’s not true. I’d take the reporting gig in a heartbeat. But the thing is, building websites (and I assume plug-ins, web apps, and the like) is just so damn fun. It’s a puzzle, and I fucking love puzzles. I love that I have to enter in a sequence of letters, numbers and symbols into a document and see if I can get it to spit out exactly what I’m looking for – it’s like a really, really long password. It’s a challenge that doesn’t end – after I’ve won the first little battle, the next one comes along and I’m enamored by a new task. It’s why we never effing go to sleep.

Rest assured, I haven’t lost my desire to write and report – I hope you’ll see my byline in the near future. But there’s a new game in town that’s taking up more and more of my hobby time, so don’t be surprised if I continue to talk to you more and more about  Web design. And if you’re one of the many who knows far more than I, get ready to share that knowledge (thanks thus far to Nacin and Balter.)

10.26.2010 | post | Programming, Web design | , , , , , | Feedback (0)

No, you shouldn’t major in journalism

It’s not a new question.

As a senior in high school and excitable sports editor of The Echo, I remember when I was first presented with it. Being someone who had already decided on future in reporting, though, I remember scoffing at the notion that someone who wanted to be a journalist shouldn’t major in the field. Maybe that works for others, I thought, but I was going to be traditional and get my journalism degree.

Technically, I majored in political communications while at GW’s School of Media and Public Affairs, but that was just a way for me to incorporate some politics into my four-year indefinite stay in the nation’s capital. My focus was always on journalism; so much so that I inadvertently completed all the requirements for a journalism major, but didn’t receive the designation because I would have needed prior approval. I settled for a minor.

I enjoyed my classes, but the few months since undergraduate experience have made it very clear that my majoring in journalism was not only unnecessary, but ill-advised. The reasoning is simple: As a journalism major, you’re taught practices and procedures that might help you learn a little bit about a given story topic when it’s needed. As a something-else-major, you become an expert in a particular field and a confident reporter with sufficient background to wholly tackle a subject area.

The possibilities are many. Major in environmental engineering so you can cover energy policy and green job development. Study business and macroeconomics so you can cover national economic trends and confidently dissect complex financial documents. Become an expert in government bureaucracy or legislative procedure and go work on Capitol Hill. Go to law school (yes, I recognize this would be post-undergrad anyway) to become a legal correspondent. Etc., etc.

Obviously, you’ve still got to develop your chops as a reporter, but that’s something gets taken care of by writing for your campus newspaper or interning. Minoring in journalism or media certainly helps too, but as much as I appreciated my professors, nearly everything I know about journalism came from my experiences and role models at The Hatchet.  Jay Rosen‘s recent comment about his experience in college journalism rings true:

“I rarely went to class. I was learning too much to stop and do that.”

UPDATE: Jay notes in the comments that the courses he didn’t go to were not journalism classes, as there was no journalism school at SUNY-Buffalo. Interestingly, he also points out that at NYU, journalism majors must double major in some other field. Seems like a fantastic compromise, albeit extra-demanding for students looking to jump into internships and side projects, too. Not that being challenged is a problem.

In fact, if you’re going to minor in journalism, ditch the boring classes and take cutting edge courses like Mike Shanahan and Jason Osder’s Online Journalism Workshop (or Convergence in Journalism course) or Jeff Jarvis’ entrepreneurial journalism class. It goes without saying that I’d also recommend studying HTML/CSS and or programming languages (though it need not be a requisite for the journalists of tomorrow.)

Naturally, there could be a number of counter-arguments or caveats to this advice. In particular, one might suggest that a student could major in journalism, but focus his or her extra-curricular time on developing the area-specific knowledge and skills mentioned above. A dedicated educational focus on the subject, however, would likely yield a more organic understanding of the field and be more productive.

Still, I’d love to hear why I’m wrong, so please tell me. For the time being, though, I’ll be looking at MBA programs and other non-journalism master’s programs.

By the way, I majored in journalism. Could you spare a few bucks for graduate tuition?

09.29.2010 | post | Journalism | , , , , , , , , , | Feedback (2)

Should journalists learn programming?

UPDATE, Dec. 1: I should mention that while I still believe in the premise of this post, I’ve spent most days since it was published wishing I could program, develop, or data process — and trying to learn.

DOUBLE UPDATE, Dec. 1: Andy Boyle makes a good point that I hadn’t considered. Much of this post is based on the premise that writers should mainly stick to writing and let the programmers do the bulk of the programming. But what if there aren’t any programmers? Smaller news orgs may have none, and a journalist with a bit of programming experience is king in a world of no programmers.

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.

07.22.2010 | post | Journalism, Programming | , , , , , , , , | Feedback (3)