Jumping From The Frying Pan Into The Fire
BoingBoing today highlights an interesting program that looks to train computer programmers to become journalists, in a grant program which gives computer programmers a master degree in Journalism. Given the hand wringing over widespread cost cutting and layoffs in the newspaper industry (the latest being the San Francisco Chronicle), and with offshore outsourcing both reducing salaries and driving away college students from the software industry, it seems this is jumping out of the frying pan into the fire. Both the journalism business and the computer software profession are undergoing huge structural changes here in the United States. Given both the journalists and computer programmers I talk to are equally concerned about their career future and opportunities in their respective fields, I wonder about the idea of combining the two.
Thoughtful post, Ben. As the guy who put together the proposal that won this grant, I would say that there could be many reasons this won’t work — but lack of opportunities won’t be one of them.
Journalists without programming skills? They have some reason to worry. Programmers whose only ability is writing code? They have a lot of reason to worry — unless they’re in India or Russia, where their skills will earn them a nice living at a lot lower pay than U.S. programmers get.
But a journalist/programmer? I truly believe they will have lots of options — from working in a traditional media company that needs people who are bilingual in tech and journalism … to being part of a startup … to being an entrepreneur. I don’t think we’ve scratched the surface yet of how journalism might benefit from a programming mindset — nor how Web applications could be built to fulfill the journalistic mission.
Rich Gordon
Read about the program here: http://www.medill.northwestern.edu/admissions/programmers.html
or my blog post about it here:
http://www.readership.org/blog2/2007/05/seeking-new-breed-of-techno-journalists.html