In fact, more and more younger journalists code or are starting to learn how to do it. The trend was first spotted by Ryan Tate for Gawker, and he listed Nick Bilton and Jennifer 8 Lee of the New York Times, Taylor Buley of Forbes and the novelist Elizabeth Spiers among others, with most of them learning or coding Python, the key programming language used at Google. Coding for them is simply a way to hand out the information in the best way possible…
The tech people behind most media outfits traditionally have not been journalists themselves. Today, though, our profession benefits from a small but growing community of tech-savvy journos, many of whom already know how to code in HTML/CSS, Python, Actionscript and other formats. These are people who share the journalistic mission and editorial ethics, but whose part in the storytelling process tends to be more about generating the story experience than the story content. Yet because they are indeed journalists, they work inside the process, as part of the editorial team, making editing and content decisions no one would ever trust to just a coder. If you have one of these folks in your newsroom, you know how invaluable they are. If you don’t, you probably have wished for one.
So, will journalists of the future need to know how to code? While the short answer to that question is yes, the longer answer is, of course, no, not all of them. It is a specialty the same as writing, design, photography, video, on-air presentation, informatics and audience management. But more and more journalists are and will include this specialty in their skill sets, both to make their journalism more effective and to make their career goals more viable.