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don’t bash newsmedia as luddites, hackerjournos have advanced the art for years

i caught the first tweet on this article earlier this week and have waited to write on it.

Will Columbia-Trained, Code-Savvy Journalists Bridge the Media/Tech Divide? | Epicenter | Wired.com.

yes i love that columbia is doing this degree. it is rigorous and serious and lengthy.

and i love that medill is successfully  working with coder journalists. and i am involved in the new hacks and hackers group. i teach this stuff at american university and have been doing it for more than a decade now. AU’s interactive journalism masters degree is also a decade old. no big press releases or anything, we just do it. it is part of the fabric of journalism and communication. and we’re not alone. many communication and journalism programs are right out there on the edge with us, advancing and creating new knowledge. ten years is a long time to be “frantic” about updating programs.

but that’s not my beef. here’s the thing that i have with this article, and the whole conversation in general. it is based in the premise that media is old and computer science can save it.  it perpetuates the self loathing rut that newsmedia has been wallowing in since they woke up to the market change moment, and fuels ranters and bashers who follow media critics like jeff jarvis and jay rosen (they’re respected friends, so chill before you flame).  to be fair and accurate, media bloggers like jeff and jay are the quickest to point out the positive work and are forces in moving journalism forward. (see note below)

and it completely ignores that  journo coders, designers and developers have done a huge deal to move the Web (and technology in general) forward… for everyone, including hackers.

i could just mention that the django python framework is a product of the journalism industry and that would probably be enough. after all, google even noticed and hosted 2008 djangoCon. but while adrian and jacob are journo coder rockstars, this isn’t a one hit wonder crossover story. there are a lot of hard working folks in the industry who have been hitting stages big and small and cranking out the hits for years. there is no way to name them all and give them justice here, but you could meet a lot of them by following the hacksandhackers.com twitter list or just go to a local  ONA meetup.

homegrown cms success stories are actually many. and things are more commonplace than the maps and data mashup applications and interactive narratives and multimedia storytelling we all think of first when we think of online journalism. whole families of wordpress and other content management  system themes are categorized as “newspaper-style” or “magazine themes” since they follow successful design patterns established by media sites over years. online media and news sites have been major players in driving video and multimedia products forward into the mass user base. soundslides was developed by a photojournalist. One of the great early evangelists of podcasting was a VJ on MTV.

so yes, there are business and management problems in the wide industry and there is a real and serious culture issue about how it regards and has regarded coders, developers and designers. and i am on the record as saying “as multimedia journalism becomes commonplace, the bar for interactive journalism moves farther.” so yes, the columbia degree is necessary. the work at medill is necessary. my work is necessary. and i will be presenting all of this and our ongoing and rolling curriculum reform at the AAUP conference this summer. and i’m working on putting a book together on the subject of how hacks and hackers work together (want to contribute a chapter?)

and i will also put it in context by noting that journalism has given a lot back to the web. because we need to get past stoking the panic with the banner headlines that journalism is dying. cause it just plain isn’t. and it never will.

NOTE:

jay rosen commented on this post at my friendfeed and took it quite personally. it wasn’t my intent to single out jay or jeff in hostility or lump them in as “bashers,” but i can see how jay got that impression. now it did strike me as a little funny that he flamed me on it even when i called him a respected friend, but i added the italicized line out of fairness  to better reflect my intent and more accurately represent them since i didn’t set out to go trolling. and even though i’m a ranter, basher, and media critic myself, the irony of not adding that context in  a post that rants about rants without context certainly didn’t escape me.