Advice for journalism students
Paul Bradshaw kicked off a minor meme titled How To Be a Journalism Student (with other’s posting here, here and here). All fine advice. But I thought I would chime in on something sort of related.
This past week, editors from a mid-sized northeastern daily came to the St. Petersburg Times to see how we do our thing online. With PolitiFact, I’m a stop on the tour now apparently. After a few minutes of talking to these editors about how PolitiFact was built, showing them a few other things I’m working on, and talking about Django, they started asking me where they could go to find journalists who could do data-driven web development. They, like a lot of places, really want to hire some. Where can you find them?
I had no answer.
There’s no journalism program I know of cranking out programmer journalists (Northwestern is making a go of it, and god bless Rich Gordon for doing it, but it’s a Masters in Journalism for people with undergraduate computer-science training, not an undergraduate journalism track. And it just started, so no graduates yet). There’s no Poynter course for this. There’s no NICAR boot camp.
So, without further ado, my advice to journalism students:
Learn how to put data on the web.
Like computers? Like problem solving? Not afraid of a little code? Interested in doing something new? Want to tell stories, but don’t believe a story is the only way to do it? Want more to do with the future of news? Learn how to put data on the web. I guarantee your campus has a Python users group or a Rails users group or a group of computer-science students doing this stuff right now. Find them. Find an idea. Build an app. If you can do it, and do it well, and do it with an eye toward news, editors are dying to hire you right now.
