the big takeaway from #wjchat – journotaxonomy
I just got out of a really great twitter chat hashed wjchat that was pitched at web journalists and kicked off tonight.
There were plenty of seasoned hacker journos there mingling with new and curious types who were online/social savvy so the pace was blisteringly brisk and friendly. In all a great chat, but there was one early thread about how coders and journalists work together (or don’t) in the newsroom that stuck in my craw, and that’s the big takeaway for me.
we absolutely have to change our thinking about defining roles in journalism. it isn’t about coders working WITH journalists in newsrooms, because coders in newsrooms ARE journalists. the other journalists are writers, or writer/reporters, or editors, or photographers, or videographers, or designers, or illustrators, but all of these functions are functions of journalism. the reporters and writers are not THE journalists, and we have to stop thinking that way (even though the old writer/reporters really like that i suspect).
the big takeaway is that journalism is just something you do — a mission or a set of guiding principles — and it is done in a lot of different ways, and code is one of those ways. the programmers and developers aren’t new-fangled geek copyboys running stories down to some digital pasteup at the beckon call of old newsasaurs. developers who work in news writing code are doing the work we call journalism, just as writers who write news are doing journalism and not writing poems.
journalists who think that some IT grunts who toil sight unseen in the boiler room of the great ship SS News so the elite can tell their stories are literally missing the boat. code is a tool used in the practice of a craft. it is the newest tool in the shed, and right now it is arguably the sharpest, becoming increasingly valuable in many important ways.
coders build the platforms that tell those stories, and sell those ads, and engage those audiences, and more, and more, and more. if the news practitioners or executives think that job belongs to computer scientists for hire or contractors, they are handing the reins of journalism — how stories are told, displayed, shared, experienced, and monetized — over to those people and effectively taking themselves out of the picture by reclassifying themselves taxonomically — as consumers and customers.
which pretty much explains why facebook now delivers more news and engages more audience than any newspaper web site, right? as hacker journalist aron pilhofer once said, “you can’t outsource your future.”
