Putting the geek into journalism

May 24, 2007 in Web 2.0, innovation, internet, multimedia

News about the first set of winners of the Knight News Challenge
has rippled across the Internet.

Rather than repeat who got what, I wanted to highlight a couple of the smaller grants. One of the innovative initiatives funded by the Knight Foundation are scholarships for computer programmers and web developers to pursue a master’s degree in journalism Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism.

The idea came from Professor Rich Gordon, who recognises that journalism in a digital age needs people who understand both journalism and technology. This does not necessarily means that every journalist needs to be able to code in Perl or some other computer language. But the industry needs people with an understanding of emerging technologies to develop new forms of journalism.

Just look at the reputation of Adrian Holovaty, recipient of a US$ 1.1m Knight Foundation award. He, too, is excited by what he describes as “journalism scholarships for geeks” at Medill.

I also wanted to highlighted one other project funded by the Knight Foundation - a news simulation called Playing the News, developed by my friend Nora Paul at the University of Minnesota, that “lets you play through a complex, evolving news story through interaction with the newsmakers”.

5 Replies

feartheseeds
May 24, 2007 at 8:08 pm

“…scholarships for computer programmers and web developers to pursue a master’s degree in journalism…”

That’s exactly what’s needed to expand the reporting industry… the College I graduated from had an extensive, for the era, tech component for the journalism program — HTML, web design courses, other courses I probably missed — but I always thought it’d be easier to teach a techie/web designer about the concepts of journalism rather than the other way round.
c
June 9, 2007 at 7:37 pm

This sounds like a great idea, however as a photojournalist and one who will seemingly be baring the brunt of all the new changes…web 2.0 content is very visual… I am a bit overwhelmed…where does on begin to get one’s feet wet? Perl, PHP, Ruby on Rails?
Where does on begin?
Nico Flores
June 11, 2007 at 10:31 am

Hi Alf

In my humble view there are two things here. One is using technology as content, e.g. doing a nice one-off Flash presentation to illustrate a story. There I agree that journalists just need to understand what is possible and what is easy. Yes, the coder who puts it together is doing some form of journalism -especially if s/he contributed to the idea- but not in the sense of being mainly concerned with some aspect of the world of events out there.

The other is about structuring ongoing editorial propositions, e.g. websites or parts of them. There the missing link is product-development, which afaik isn’t a degree taught in j-schools. Being a journalist or a developer helps with that, but so does being a good marketer or designer; what matters is your ability to bridge the various disciplines, and to come up with products that work in your market. In fact, having one of these backgrounds may not even be strictly necessary - I can think of one or two brilliant counterexamples.
Alfred Hermida
June 11, 2007 at 5:15 pm

That’s a good point Nico. Journalists should learn about the web development and design process. I have tried to integrate some of these elements into the graduate journalism Masters at UBC. But there is still more to do. Journalism courses should include modules on innovation and entrepreneurship, as well as traditional news skills.

1 Wordblog » Blog Archive » News program for geeks Pingback on May 26th, 2007 at 12:02 am
[...] "Putting the geek into journalism" is how Alfred Hermida neatly put its. He writes: The idea came from Professor Rich Gordon, who recognises that journalism in a digital age needs people who understand both journalism and technology. This does not necessarily means that every journalist needs to be able to code in Perl or some other computer language. But the industry needs people with an understanding of emerging technologies to develop new forms of journalism. [...]