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Milepost 9,605 on Journalism’s Road to Oblivion
Just a few months ago, there was outrage from the “profession” of journalism when reports of layoffs in the newspaper world generated unsympathetic “learn to code!” comments across the internet. (That’s a story in its own right…)
It seems the Society of Professional Journalists has a short memory, as they’ve bestowed their prestigious Distinguished Teaching in Journalism Award on a professor, who, you guessed it, teaches journalism students to code:
Or maybe Professor McAdams and the SPJ know something about the future of journalism that they’d prefer the public not notice. Here’s the key paragraph:
After seeing changes in the journalism industry with a shift toward digital, McAdams prepared students by creating a sequence of coding courses for journalists. With her guidance, students were able to go from “I know nothing about coding” to high-end news app developers who are making major marks in the industry in their first jobs out of college.
Conveniently, when their turn in the barrel comes, “news app developers” are “app developers”, unlike their “journalist” peers, who… aren’t.
Hat tip: @dkiesow
Published in Journalism
Teach journalism majors logic?
Yeah, okay. Maybe they’ll be excited by exploring what heretofore has been uncharted territory for many of them.
It actually is a pretty good idea, and not just for journalists.
I promise to treat a journalist fairly, should I ever encounter some actual journalism. If the people pretending to journalists code as well as they write, perhaps they can #learnToInstallSolarPanels
I meet young journalists all the time, when someone drags the interns or visitors from the J school through the office, and I tell them to code. They get it and they agree. But, hate speech.
I learned to code about forty years ago. Since then, I have worked in who-knows-how-many computer languages. But I have never considered myself a techie type. My college geology and astronomy professor often said that the future would belong to people who knew how to do some specialty and to program computers in order to automate how the jobs were done. In my case, he has not been wrong. Ability to code has only supplemented the many other things I do and know, and supported those other endeavors.
Two of the best programmers I ever worked with were Fine Arts majors. One of them quit his programming job when he got a gig for the summer playing trumpet on a cruise ship. I’d have gone with if I could.
It wasn’t hate speech when it was journalists advising ex-coal miners. It didn’t become hate speech until it was computer types advising journalists.
Indeed. Even the ability to put together macros in Excel or a short “.BAT” file to automate the little things makes a huge difference in productivity. And if you can do those, then more formal programming is right around the corner.
Aside from that, I do find it interesting that the award announcement suggests that the media is simply transitioning to digital formats. If that spin were even remotely true, the industry wouldn’t be convulsed with layoff after layoff after layoff. If you read much of dkiesow‘s timeline, you see numerous critiques of the loss of actual newsroom/content creation capacity, especially for local consumption.
It will never work until someone develops a programming language that is reliably woke. IF THEN statements are entirely too arbitrary unless the THEN statement includes sufficient virtue signaling.