I understand passion and, intellectually, I understand what Mindy McAdams is writing about in her post Why you should suck it up and learn to script and what Matt Neznanski is addressing in his Wired Journalists post What tools? Wrong question. Both are advocating, passionately and strongly, that journalists learn skills such as JavaScript, HTML and CSS.
But while I understand it, I think they are both wrong.
All of those skills are about the delivery of journalism, not journalism itself. Yes, yes, yes, the more that a journalist understands what those technologies can do, the better equipped they are to take advantage of them. If I were an editor, I would want a tech-smart newsroom that knew about the potential for database reporting or interactive graphics or journalistic mapping and knew how to tailor the reporting to those. But that’s what I would want them doing — reporting. Not coding. After all, in the ’60s and ’70s reporters weren’t trained to operate the Linotpye, set type on a stick or lock down the chase.
We need to make sure our j-students (and working journalists) really understand these technologies (and that includes audio and video) as storytelling tools. That’s vital, because if we fail to do that, we’re not giving the next generation of journalists the smarts they need to get a job.
We do need to make it possible for those who understand the journalism and who get turned on by the coding to have the opportunity to develop those skills. Because when this all shakes out, we’re going to need those folks out doing the reporting with a clear understanding of how the information they gather can be best used, and we’re going to need the people back at the office (or at the other end of a modem) who have the tech skills and a clear understanding of the journalism.
I believe we better sever students not by piling on the tech they must learn in depth (audio, video, database, Flash, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, CMS) but by piling on the understanding, so they can bring the storytelling to bear on the technology and not vice versa.
Tags: education, journalism, Technology
I think we have come to the place where the amount of skill in XHTML, CSS and JavaScript I’m calling for is the equivalent of something I was expected to be able to do in j-school in 1979: operate a typewriter. I do not think a little competency in these things is anything remotely like running the Linotype.
Setting up a CMS is perhaps like running the Linotype. I’m not calling for that level of expertise.
Fixing a messed-up bit of HTML is like knowing the proofreading marks.
I was taught and tested (more than once) on both copy-editing and proofreading markup in my j-school. I was expected to be able to take a marked proof and make the corrections on the computer that created the camera-ready galleys. I wasn’t a design student. We didn’t have a design concentration. I was just a plain print reporting student in a newspaper journalism program at a state university.
Times have changed. Yesterday, proofreading marks; today, HTML.
Over-reaction is possible. And heavens knows, we don’t need any more tight, artificial circles drawn around anything to do with newspapering. I think that’s part of what has newspapers in trouble.
Mark, perhaps both of us are guilty of overreacting, but I am troubled by this post.
By stating “that’s what I would want them doing — reporting. Not coding,” it seems to me that you’re drawing a tight, artificial circle around the reporting process and declaring that everything inside that circle is journalism and everything outside that circle isn’t.
While it is true that many entry-level journalism jobs are pure reporting, it’s also true that many are not. The “composing room” no longer exists in print and we expect print production editors to be journalists with skills in typography and design as well as news judgment. I think that positioning technology as the 21st century equivalent of a linotype backshop takes us in the wrong direction.
As for learning to set type on a stick, in the ’60s and ’70s the University of Illinois offered a journalism course in which students did exactly that. See http://www.yelvington.com/node/358