Category Archives: programming

Martin Belam’s currybetdotnet: Do journalists need to learn to be programmers? Yes. And no.

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Martin Belam: "As a general rule of thumb, if any of the jobs you do in your day to day working involve repeatedly pressing the same sequence of keys on your keyboard, involves you cutting'n'pasting text from one place to another, or doing the same thing over and over again like resizing images, it is almost certain that investing a little time in programming a script will make that task easier."

Gawker: Hack to Hacker: Rise of the Journalist-Programmer

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Ryan Tate: "Learning to program is yet another way journalists are becoming generalists, more like pamphleteer, typesetter, postmaster and newspaper publisher Ben Franklin and his fellow ink-stained polymaths than highly specialized publishing types like Bob Woodward, Annie Leibovitz or Mario Garcia. Your typical professional blogger might juggle tasks requiring functional knowledge of HTML, Photoshop, video recording, video editing, video capture, podcasting, and CSS, all to complete tasks that used to be other people's problems, if they existed at all: production, design, IT, etc."

MediaGuardian: Will journalists of the future need to know how to code?

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"DoctorFegg" in the comments: "Of course, in theory you have a digital department to do this. But, well, good luck with that. In my experience the small companies simply don't have the staff, whereas the big ones have an inflexible company-wide architecture that simply doesn't allow for local initiative - look at all those dreary identikit "this is..." sites. It's the same as it's always been. On small titles, whether they're magazines or newspapers, you can't get too precious about your job title. If something will help the magazine, you roll up your sleeves and do it."