Journalists may learn to code. Not convinced? Read this story Scooped by Code.
You can be a good journalist without being able to do lots of things. But every skill you don’t have leaves a whole class of stories out of your reach. And data stories are usually the ones that are hiding in plain sight.
Scraping websites, cleaning data, and querying Excel-breaking data sets are enormously useful ways to get great stories. If you don’t know how to write software to help you acquire and analyze data, there will always be a limit to the size of stories you can get by yourself. And that’s a limit that somebody who competes with you won’t have.
What will do this to programming languages and tools? The programming language and tools community has some interesting work coming up.
When Scientists started programming, we had to add support for Math, Statistics and Analysis and Plots libraries to your programming language.
Who else will learn to code? How about moms, dads and grandparents to fill the gap in education and entertainment for the children in their family?
When kids started learning to code, we started inventing tools like Scratch and Snap.
Now when journalists learn to code, we need to give them something better, simpler, more intuitive, easier to use than Excel macros.
What will it be?