Why you should suck it up and learn to script
Let’s think about programming today. Or scripting, if you will.
To go beyond static pages of text and images online, you will need at least a little programming. One reason why I advocate for everyone to learn at least a little is that if you bog down your newsroom’s expert programmer with too many trivial tasks, he or she will never have time to do any real work. You pay a real programmer too much to waste his or her time. It’s inefficient. It indicates poor management decision-making. Bad resource allocation. In short, it’s short-sighted.
Another reason: A person who understands the basic ideas of programming is in a better position to conceptualize good ways to do digital stuff. It’s not only that you can talk more coherently to the programmers; it’s also that you can differentiate a viable project from an impractical one.
I was reading some related ideas in this interview in Columbia Journalism Review, in which Brad Stenger, of Wired magazine, said:
… it seems like the division of labor question is being misaddressed by news organizations across the board — that IT and maintaining infrastructure is different than dealing with and processing news as data, especially for the purpose of getting insight out of it.
In 1994-95, part of my job was to have a weekly meeting with the head of IT (and his deputy) at The Washington Post. I was essentially the liaison between the new online operation and the newsroom IT department. It was clear then that the IT people in newsroom systems are not the people you can turn to, to get dynamic data appearing in a story about, say, local housing prices. Their job is completely different from that — now as well as then.
Too many journalists and editors and publishers think “an IT guy” is a programmer. That’s the first mistake. An IT guy typically is not a programmer at all.
A similar mistake is to think that your HTML and JavaScript wizard-person knows how to scale up the servers that keep your site running. Usually not. I had a job once where my boss wanted me to do things with Web servers, and my almost total lack of knowledge about servers really soured our relationship. Running servers is a whole other job, darn it! (The job description said nothing about servers. If it had, I would not have applied.)
What you’re not seeing in a lot of organizations, and where The New York Times is ahead, is the productivity and the manpower it takes to support all of this work. Where the computer science comes in, it’s not so much doing a one-off information graphic. … But now you build this machine, for lack of a better term, which functions as an information graphic, but it will take yesterday’s information, and it’ll take today’s information, and it’ll also take tomorrow’s information.
Your IT people cannot do this (see an example).
The question is, do you have any journalists on staff who even know what Stenger is talking about?
That’s what I’m talking about, and that’s why I’m telling you that every journalist should know at least a little programming.
How do you get started?
I have a slim, tattered book on my shelf, titled JavaScript for the World Wide Web, 2nd edition, by Negrino and Smith. The copyright is 1998. I remember I was not very keen on learning JavaScript, but I was starting to see some things online that obviously required JavaScript, and I wanted to understand how they were done.
The book is less than 200 pages. I think I worked through the first eight chapters (112 pages), and then I felt satisfied. It probably took me about a week. I understood how to make rollover effects, create cookies, build dynamic pages (not that that worked very well then), and spawn pop-up windows.
It’s not that I could do any of this from memory — I still needed to consult the book if I wanted to implement these things. But I had the fundamentals clear in my mind.
I comprehended how cookies work, for example. I could explain why cookies would be a good idea, or not, for addressing a particular issue on a Web site. Or I could solve a problem if I knew that setting a cookie would do what was required. I could look the programmer in the eye and say, “Wouldn’t a cookie take care of that?” If the answer was no, I could understand the programmer’s explanation for why not.
Some links to get you going
- Learning JavaScript — lecture series; four video and slide presentations given by Douglas Crockford,* senior JavaScript Architect at Yahoo!
- Ajax: A New Approach to Web Applications
- Learning JavaScript for Beginners
- DOM Scripting: Learning JavaScript
* While Crockford recommends the O’Reilly JavaScript reference, I would say you should not start with a fat reference book, but rather choose something short and simple, with small and practical projects you can work through. Even though the new Negrino and Smith book is more than twice as long as the one I learned from 10 years ago, it’s still a good starter text. Jeremy Keith’s book is aimed at designers — I haven’t examined this book, but the reviews have been very positive.
Update (2:40 p.m.): In a meeting today I heard someone say — erroneously — that the “graphics people” do all the data integration in these scripted online projects nowadays. Wrong! Reporters do data — especially the investigative reporters.
Hey Mindy,
As I mentioned a little to you, I’m teaching a summer course to try and fill this void. The class, titled “Content Management, Data and APIs,” came about as I heard what former students were telling me regarding their day to day workflows. The course will have three main goals:
1. Each student will install, configure and maintain a CMS with individual Web hosting. Students can choose to make this a publication, a blog or something else.
2. Implement JavaScript libraries. I’m planning on basic JS logic/syntax and using jQuery and Prototype to build user interface components for sites. All news sites are using shared spaces, carousels and accordions.
3. Use APIs from Google, Yahoo, Flickr, etc. to build with data. Definitely will do some dynamic maps. Planning on the final project requiring scraping or cleaning a data source and generating a data visualization.
I’m going to be marketing this class to journalism students as well as others in computer science, engineering and digital arts. Because of the mixed audience, I’m not assuming any base knowledge other than HTML/CSS skill to build a basic personal site.
The goal isn’t to build Adrian clones but instead to have the students gain a very useful toolset and understand there are many more pieces to the online puzzle than HTML/CSS.
March 5, 2008 at 9:43 amWhat a coincidence! One of our newsroom artists was working on an Ohio primary-night map of results by county and ran into problems — in this case, Actionscript for Flash. I was able to step in and help — first, to debug his original code; then, to write script that automated the color-coding.
I first learned programming back on punchcards. It’s taken two and a half years for that skill to become useful in the newsroom. But you’re absolutely right: It is valuable now. And — while I hope I don’t have to roll up my sleeves very often to script last-minute saves — knowing what’s possible is very important. Not only, as you say, for knowing what to ask for, but also knowing what NOT to demand. Editors who don’t have a grasp of what’s easy and what’s not, what can be done in time and what will take too long, can make things horrible for the folks charged with getting the job done.
March 5, 2008 at 9:57 am@John: Ha, I did not want to say I learned programming on IBM punch cards, but in fact, I did. It was 1979, and I took an elective course in FORTRAN. For some strange reason, I thought the future of the world would be “computerized” …
March 5, 2008 at 12:12 pmOops, I mistyped: Make that two and a half DECADES for that skill to be useful. Fortran, Cobol, Pascal and waaaay too many nights fueled by Doritos and Mr. Pibb, waiting for the batch to run.
But then, I built my first computer myself … out of cardboard! Ma Bell used to offer CARDIAC kits for grade school kids to make simple, but programmable, cardboard calculators.
March 5, 2008 at 1:22 pmMindy, once again – you’re on the money. What I try to explain to people is that if you have some understanding of these things, even if you don’t have to do them every day, it really helps you communicate with the people who do have to do it every day. (And we are in the communications business, after all.)
March 6, 2008 at 12:28 amIt also empowers you to understand what is possible and why. I recently led the redesign and move of my organization’s Web site to a database-driven system. My ability to “speak database” to the programmer made the process easier for both of us – we had many “ah-ha” moments when I was able to put things in terms of a database. Even more importantly, I was able to ask for what I wanted because I know enough about databases to know what is possible. I’m not anywhere close to being a database expert but I get the concepts.
And that ability to understand the concepts is much of what makes me valuable to my boss – something everyone should keep in mind these days. If you can bridge that gap in your organization, you become infinitely more valuable.
Journalists often have to know a little bit about a lot of things and that holds just as true in this area.
Thanks for the insight, Pia. Yesterday a member of the advisory council for my college’s Journalism Department emphasized how important it is now for our students to understand how databases work — ideally, they will also know how to create databases.
I made a note to myself to make sure to incorporate some database work into my courses.
March 6, 2008 at 7:47 amGreat post Mindy. I would love to see this integrated into more J-School programs. I haven’t met too many journalists with scripting knowledge, but I can just imagine the possibilities….
March 6, 2008 at 11:59 amI got shivers when I read the anecdote about a former manager trying to turn you into a server admin.
And I own a copy of DOM Scripting by Jeremy Keith if you want to borrow it after I return from Austin (where I will have a beer with him).
Love, Your Server Admin
March 6, 2008 at 12:23 pmI love my server guy. He is the crucial buffer between me and all hardware and software issues I want to hide from!
March 6, 2008 at 2:49 pm[...] passion and, intellectually, I understand what Mindy McAdams is writing about in her post Why you should suck it up and learn to script and what Matt Neznanski is addressing in his Wired Journalists post What tools? Wrong question. [...]
March 7, 2008 at 12:16 amMindy, this could serve as a simple example for your students:
http://www.cyndiloza.com
The graphic at the bottom measures articles (with CSS) by word count, which we know print people love. Obviously, a CMS manages the data, but Google Charts is also a great place to get started with automated creation.
March 12, 2008 at 5:37 pm[...] details and Daytona Beach I took Mindy McAdams’ advice from a couple of weeks ago and started to learn [...]
March 18, 2008 at 12:09 am[...] Why you should suck it up and learn to script [...]
June 5, 2008 at 7:01 am[...] Why you should suck it up and learn to script (March 5, 2008) [...]
August 22, 2008 at 11:05 am