Being a journalist means being a student: Should you learn to code?

In the first quarter of my freshman year at the University of California-Santa Cruz I had a wonderful history professor named William Hitchcock. I loved his lectures, which an earlier chancellor had called “a masterpiece, every one.” But what I really liked was how this professional historian would look at us 18-year-old dummies and call us “historians.”

“Since we’re all historians,” he’d say, and then talk about how we historians might want to reason together about whatever subject was at hand.

Now I’m a professional, though I’m not a historian but the short-attention-span version, a journalist, and I look at things the other way around: I think we professionals are all students.

We have to be, with how fast everything changes.

So when I read something like this piece in PBS MediaShift’s EducationShift section about how journalism students should all learn a little coding, I don’t just see it as advice for college kids. I see it as advice for all journalists, because every journalist is a student.

Aaron Chimbel, a journalism professor at TCU, writes:

If we value clear writing and the ability to communicate clearly with a wide variety of people, we should value teaching our students the basics of computer languages and digital communications. These skills will only be more important going forward, and more importantly code, a broad term encompassing several computing languages, is the future of digital and global communication. If we don’t expose our students to this—students we want to lead the next generation of journalism and communication—we are doing them a disservice …

What is important is to expose all students to the basics of coding and to give them a baseline of understanding this language, the language of the future … What is important is for students who don’t become programmers—and most won’t—to be able understand how information can be gathered and presented using code and how to use it for journalism, even if they aren’t the ones actually building the project.

Chimbel compares learning some code to studying a language. You might not become fluent, but “you learn a lot about thinking and culture from learning a new language.” He also points out that, fortunately for those of us not enrolled in school, there are several free online resources, such as Code Academy, Code{Actually} and Code.org.

I’ve made a false start or two at Code Academy. I keep meaning to get back to it. Any of my fellow students feel the same way?