E-Media Tidbits

medill.northwestern.edu Journalism prof. Rich Gordon at Medill's June 13 graduation ceremony.

Journalists with strong technical skills may be in high demand -- but they're currently in short supply. Rich Gordon, associate professor at Medill School of Journalism, Northwestern University, wants to close that gap. He plans to use his $639,000 Knight News Challenge grant will fund a new scholarship program to lure computer scientists into Medill's journalism program.

Guest contributor Daniel Schultz recently interviewed Gordon about this program.

Schultz: Why do you think the Knight Foundation decided to fund your scholarship program?

Gordon: One reason is that the media industry has come to realize how important the intelligent application of technology is to building online engagement. You can go into a room of newsroom leaders now and say, "We need more people like Adrian Holovaty," and everyone nods their head. Also, newsrooms have begun hiring programmer/developers themselves instead of assuming that these functions will be provided by IT departments or corporate online divisions.

Beyond that, I think Medill's graduate program is ideally situated to enroll students like this. It's built for students who have not necessarily studied journalism before, and we have classes (we call them "innovation projects") where students work together to solve a real content, business, or audience problem.

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Our Media Management Project class, which we specifically cited in our grant application, has regularly generated new product ideas that get launched by real media companies. We'll enroll our new programmer-journalists in this class.

We hope and expect that adding programmer-journalists to our mix of students will enable the class to produce even better results, including real functionality -- not just prototypes or mockups.

Schultz: What exactly is the "staffing void" you see, and how deep and dark do you think it is?

Gordon: Traditional newsrooms have not employed programmer or developers. Their parent companies do have programmers on staff -- but when push comes to shove, their time is typically prioritized to projects like payroll and accounts payable. Even when newsrooms have had direct access to programmers, there is a communication gap: programmers don't necessarily understand the mission or process of journalism.

We're now going to see what happens when we train programmer and developers to understand journalism and how journalists work. We also will give more of our journalism students the experience of working with programmers and developers, so they'll be better prepared to communicate with tech people in the workplace. So we hope to close the journalism/technology gap from both directions.

Schultz: Many other industries hire computer science or information system students without requiring a dual degree. Do you think technologists must be a formally trained journalists before they can apply technology to the process of journalistic communication?

Gordon: I think technologists can apply their skills to any discipline. But in my experience, news organizations, companies that don't have anything to do with journalism, and other institutions (for instance, universities), there's often a disconnect between the technologists (who don't necessarily understand how the institution works, or should work) and the other staff (who don't necessarily understand the technology). Successful organizations build understanding among both groups so they can communicate with each other and come up with the best technology solutions to the organization's problems.

In my experience, the most common approach has been to identify "power users" (skilled managers among the non-technical people) and make them responsible for the success of technology-related projects.

This grant allows us to experiment with a different approach. We'll see what kinds of great journalism-related ideas might arise from technologists who gain a deep understanding of the culture, role, process and outcomes of journalism.

Schultz: How important are technologists to the future of journalism?

Gordon: I think we can see that they are critical to the present of journalism! Think of the impact that programmers have had already on how people find information on the Web. They created Google News, RSS feeds, Digg, etc.

Furthermore the online news sites which are doing the best job of satisfying audiences' information needs online -- Yahoo News, CNet, CNN.com, etc. -- deliver content via applications that were built by programmer and developers.

So far there aren't as many examples of programmer-journalists who apply their skills directly to the creation and presentation of journalistic stories. But Adrian Holovatydemonstrates what someone with both programming and journalism skills can do.

Schultz: Do you have anything else you would like to say to or ask of the professional journalism community?

When we start graduating students from this program I hope newsrooms will hire them, compensate them appropriately, and give them interesting and important work to do.

Beyond that, I'd love it if media organizations stepped forward to fund more scholarships like this, at Medill or other schools.

Guest contributor Daniel Schultz is an information systems undergraduate at Carnegie Mellon University. Rich Gordon also contributes to E-Media Tidbits.