My plan to stay relevant (and employed)

Over the past little while, I’ve been reading and thinking a lot about a new type of media job: a hybrid position that some people are calling “programmer-journalist.” Witness, for example:

• From PBS.org in 2007: Meet the First Two Journalist- Programmers about Brian Boyer and Ryan Mark, both winners of Knight News Challenge scholarships
• From the Knight Foundation itself: 4th Programmer-Journalist Scholarship Winner Learns to ‘Think Like a Journalist’ about another Knight scholarship winner, Manya Gupta
• Mashable’s roundup of How Programmer/Journalists Are Changing the News

Just this past week, Jenny Carpenter sent me a link to a Guardian article: Will journalists of the future need to know how to code? From it:

Up until now, as a journalist you worked with information, researching facts and figures which then you passed on to the reader. However, in a digital world there are more platforms you can use to convey that information – think of maps or mobile applications, augmented reality. And to be able to do that you will have know how to code.

Now, I’m no programmer. Not a real one, anyway. Sure, I know enough HTML and CSS to tweak WordPress themes. I know a tiny little bit of PHP. Through school, I worked summers at a software company. And once upon a time, in the summer of 1998, I wrote a reasonably popular piece of (now-useless) Windows shareware in Visual Basic.

But really, I’m no programmer. Though I intend to become one.

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“Why?” you ask?

I work in public radio, a business that’s experiencing a renaissance through digital technology, especially podcasts. There are lots of exciting things happening in places where the web meets the radio. Judging by the success of shows like Radiolab, and Planet Money, there’s an appetite for compelling stories told in new and interesting ways. A big part of that is happening online. For example, look at how simple yet compelling the Globe and Mail’s interactive map of Haiti is.

Companies like the CBC (my employer) need people who can build this kind of stuff. They need storytellers with programming chops, and programmers with storytelling chops.

I want to be one of those people.

So then, starting today, I’m embarking on a course of self-directed study. It’s my intention to become a sort of programmer-journalist, and I plan to blog about what I find here in this space. First step: learn Python.

I’d love to hear any thoughts or suggestions about where I should take this. Comments are most welcome.

This American Infographic

A very, very cool project: This American Infographic.

My new years resolution is to make an infographic on every This American Life ever made. The idea is to expand and add context to the stories and information contained in the shows. Basically, anything I am curious about while listening to the pieces.

That’s a tall order, given that there are almost 15 years’ worth of episodes. Can’t wait to see more of these.

via @zuschlag, via For Me, For You

Early days

What are the major consequences of internet on society and culture? Perhaps it’s too early to tell.

Clay Shirky, on last week’s episode of Spark:

If you had gone to Germany in the mid-1470s and said, let’s see what this printing press is doing, right, you would miss novels, you would miss newspapers, you would miss the rise of scientific publication, you would miss Martin Luther’s “95 Theses,” you would miss the Venetian publishing industry. So many of the changes brought by the kind of abundance created by the printing press were in the second 50 years of its existence, if not the second century of its existence, that I think that over-extrapolating from current trends would leave us in the same position as if we tried to do the printing press in 1473.

And Bob Stein, on last week’s episode of On The Media:

Here’s a wonderful sort of factoid which may be helpful: The Western version of the printing press is invented in 1454. It takes 50 years for page numbers to emerge. It took humans that long to figure out that it might be useful to put numbers onto the pages.

Or, as management-types like to say, “It’s early days.”

Correlation ≠ Causation

Lee Rainnie, director of the Pew Internet and American Life project, from this week’s On the Media, speaking about social isolation and internet use:

For centuries, when new technologies come on the scene there’s almost an instinctive human reaction, particularly among those who are challenged by the new technology, to blame the technology for any social ill that happens to arise at the same time. Something has gone on with our social networks in the past 20 years. Our data matched the data that the previous researchers had collected showing the networks are shrinking.

And so, now we’re inviting other social scientists and researchers like ourselves to go out and find the real culprit and not just think that the Internet lies behind it just because the Internet was being adopted at the same time this harmful social trend was emerging.

Reminds me a bit of Russell Davies’s The Internet Isn’t Killing Anything.

The Bloor

Via Joey deVilla’s blog, a link to The Bloor, a documentary film about The Bloor Cinema.

The Bloor is a pretty special place for me. It’s where I met Jenna back in 2005, and it’s where I proposed a few years later. You can watch the whole doc in two parts on YouTube: