Having done both journalism and cs in undergrad and grad, respectively, I'd say the former is more nuanced.
Both are relatively easy to dabble in, both relatively hard to reach expertise.
Things like the inverted pyramid, sourcing and neutral voice will get you fairly far in terms of basic information relaying, but great journalists are specifically skilled at interviewing, data diving and other things tertiary to pen on paper.
In retrospect, I was never suited for journalism. I can write well, but that's not really a great (traditional) journalism skill. The finished product for hard news is fairly bland and paint by numbers. Anything else treads into entertainment-journalism and the kinds of things that have a bunch of people screaming "fake news." I call that Race-To-The-Bottom Journalism and it's very in vogue these days.
I have less than great communications skills but have had great experience pairing with people who have good skills. Eg to give corporate seminars we both go onstage and the partner will structure the talk and interrupt me/clarify if I blur over something/watch for the audience’s reaction.
As a parallel, maybe journalists should pair with subject matter people (even subject matter generalists) rather than have them as “sources”. There are of course people who are great at both things (your Nate Silvers) but the whole process might be cheaper and more efficient if, gee, the New York Times would have a couple onstaff PhD economists (not star columnists) that sit in the newsroom trying to give shape to the facts about to be reported, side by side with journalists.
There are some courses on Poynter. One the best material I've seen was '50 writing 'tools' it was a serie of blog posts that are no longer online but you'll have no troubles finding it on the web.
> Roy Peter Clark... whittled down almost thirty years of experience in journalism, writing, and teaching into a series of fifty short essays on different aspects of writing
Just imho: I’ve found journalism awkward to teach because at its heart, it’s all very much just skills you use as an everyday human, with an extra emphasis on being unafraid to ask questions. My high school journalism teacher told me that if I wanted to learn journalism, the best way was to just do it. And not to go to j-school but to just work for the college paper. And I think that still applies to any working adults today. Besides doing it, being an avid news consumer is great preparation.
As a former journalist, yes and no. When I first started, my company treated me to a 1 week internal course, that was very good. As I recall, there was a day on story structure - news leads v feature, pyramid, delayed drop etc. A day on the basics of law for journalism - libel and the like. A day on interviewing and keeping transcripts. A day on ethics,, on the record, off the record, non-attributable. There was also a dy on what subs do - headline writing and the like. All in in all a good, very useful grounding.
No. This was in the mid to early 1980s in the UK, for a large B2B computer magazine publisher (VNU). Journalism school really wasn't 'a thing' to nearly the same degree then. Instead you were trained on the job. My degree was biology, but I had worked a lot on the student newspaper.
I don't think this kind of induction training was typical - it was just put on by that particular company at that particular period. But it was very good. Shout out to the trainer who I still remember 30 years later. You were excellent Tim https://www.linkedin.com/in/tim-ring-33b7233
Yeah I interned and worked at 2 large regional papers and I never got trained in writing or story structure, just on how to use the CMS, LexisNexis, and occasionally the in-house lawyer would come in to do off-the-record q&a’s about legal issues
The skills of a good journalist — interviewing, elicitation, focus on critical details, and the ability to build a compelling story — are skills that /anyone/ should find valuable. But a developer or architect responsible for product, process, or service design should find it particularly useful when interviewing users and stakeholders and determining functional and experiential design.
When running a startup, and you either want the press to talk to you, or the press decides that you're an interesting story.
Larger companies have PR people to handle that kind of thing. In a startup, though, it could easily be a programmer who talks to the press, because there isn't anyone else.
There are courses on how to speak to the media. They are aimed at CEOs, politicians etc, or anyone who might need to speak to the media. Often taught by reporters, or ex-reporters.
I’ve done one, I’d recommend it. I have rarely talked to journalists, but the skills are useful in any situation where you’re being ‘grilled’, like a job interview.
Communication skills would be a prerequisite for journalist skills, and I see the front page of Hacker News filled with discussions on communication skills every other day.
Small things like putting the executive summary on top, starting every speech/article/email with a hook that tells the user why they care, etc. If a bunch of coders could master those skills, and combine it with data analysis and web design skills, then they could become a force that can compete with the mainstream media.
It's not symmetrical like that. Journalists report on data based phenomena all the time, so understanding statistics is a fairly useful skill.
Programmers don't typically have to do journalism. They do have to write, but writing =/= journalism. If we're talking about writing classes for programmers, personally I don't think there's anything special about the programmer use case, as opposed to "writing in professional contexts" in general.
If you currently work at the NYT as a data-science researcher, doing the job that journalists without data-science experience can’t do, and you see your job imperilled by this, you’ll want to do exactly what these journalists are doing, but in reverse: Expanding their role to something they didn’t previously do in order to stay competitive in the job market.
Both are relatively easy to dabble in, both relatively hard to reach expertise.
Things like the inverted pyramid, sourcing and neutral voice will get you fairly far in terms of basic information relaying, but great journalists are specifically skilled at interviewing, data diving and other things tertiary to pen on paper.
In retrospect, I was never suited for journalism. I can write well, but that's not really a great (traditional) journalism skill. The finished product for hard news is fairly bland and paint by numbers. Anything else treads into entertainment-journalism and the kinds of things that have a bunch of people screaming "fake news." I call that Race-To-The-Bottom Journalism and it's very in vogue these days.