Journalism and coding: How to get a job when you don’t have all the skills

Jeremy B. Merrill and Sisi Wei are a couple of young interactive news developers who gave a talk to students and recent grads about “getting a job in journalism code” at the NICAR 2014 conference. NICAR stands for National Institute for Computer Assisted Reporting.

They’ve followed that up with a blog post collecting those questions and answers “as well as some of the best guidance we were given while looking for jobs or internships.” 

Merrill is an interactive news developer for the New York Times who helped develop Tabula, “a tool for liberating data tables locked inside PDF files.” Wei is a news applications developer at ProPublica and the co-founder of Code With Me, which runs workshops for journalists to learn to code. 

For me, and I think for a lot of people trained in journalism, talk about code is scary. It’s one thing to say, as I often do to students and early-career writers who ask me for advice, that it wouldn’t hurt to learn a little coding, because that’s an increasingly in-demand skill. But now that the rudimentary HTML skills I picked up in the ’90s have become obsolete, I don’t know the first thing about coding, including how to start learning about it. 

The message from Merrill and Wei: Relax, stay curious and keep learning. A couple of highlights from the long, link-rich Q&A:

Q: This job listing says I need to know Python and ArcGIS and Responsive Web Design and videography and D3.js and R and FOIA and Ruby on Rails and statistics and WordPress. Should I still apply?

Yes. C’mon, literally no one knows all of those things and the people doing the hiring know it. The list of skills is their wish list, not their bare minimum requirements. Do not be discouraged from applying simply because you only know 4 out of the 12 things listed.

Rather than someone who has a minimal understanding of a wide variety of tools, an employer will appreciate someone who really knows their stuff in one area—regardless of whether that’s videography, public records or scaling databases. But keep learning. Because, after basic journalism (and, if applicable, programming) skills, what hiring managers really want to see is you demonstrating your ability to learn new tools …

Q: Okay, so how do I get started learning to code?

Learning how to code is all about taking is one step at a time and having a project in mind. Sisi actually wrote about this. Lisa Williams blogs about how to get started and puts up tutorials frequently. Lena Groeger wrote about how she learned to code in a year. There’s a lot you can read about this topic.

That last bit is huge: There’s a lot to read on this topic. Merrill and Wei make the point, in reference to whether real programmers copy and paste code from the internet, that “one key to being a good programmer is knowing not to reinvent the wheel.” If you don’t know anything about coding and want to learn, you don’t have to blaze a trail. Start reading.