TITLE: Programming for Everyone: Journalists
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: December 01, 2011  3:06 PM
DESC: 
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BODY:
Jacob Harris begins his recent
<A HREF="http://www.niemanlab.org/2011/11/in-praise-of-impractical-programming/">
   In Praise of Impractical Programming</A>
with a short discussion of how programming is becoming
an integral part of the newsroom:

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
For the past few years, I've been working as a software
developer in the newsroom, where perceptions of my kind have
changed from
<A HREF="http://nymag.com/news/features/all-new/53344/">
   novelty</A>
to
<A HREF="http://www.newsnerdjobs.com/">
   a necessity</A>.
Recognizing this, some journalism schools now even require
programming courses to teach students practical skills with
databases or web frameworks.  It's thrilling to contemplate
a generation of web-hacking journalists -- but I wish we
could somehow squeeze a little magic into their course load. 
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

This seems like a natural evolutionary path that many industries
will follow in the coming years or decades.  At first it will be
enough to use other people's tools.  Then, practitioners will
want to be able to write code in a constrained environment, such
as a web framework or a database application.  Eventually, I
suspect that at least a few of the programming practitioners
will tire of the constraints, step outside of the box, and write
the code -- and maybe even the tools -- they want and need.  If
<A HREF="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2011-10.html#e2011-10-04T16_43_41.htm">
   historians can do it</A>,
so can journalists.
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