Look, you’re right, okay? But you’re also wrong.

“Every day [journalists] are linguistically challenged, visually challenged, historically challenged, not to mention challenged by stone walling and downright dishonest officials.”

One of the reasons I think journalism is so error prone is that the challenges are so numerous and journalists, like all of us, have many areas that they dislike, don’t understand, or don’t think fall in the job description.

This is why journalistic humility is so important: “reduce the harm from each error and each slippage from the objective news ideal by reducing the majesty of your claim to know.”

Tim and Saul make an extremely important point. Too few editors are technologists. Too many newsrooms think about technology only when it fails rather than thinking about it as a part of the craft just like the reporter’s notebook and the inverted pyramid.

What Tim wrote is especially interesting because there are many parallels between the challenges journalists face and the challenges software developers face. In both cases, there is lots of ambiguity, no right answer and guaranteed failure (software bugs) that must be approached in terms of minimization rather than outright prevention. This familiarity may be one explanation for the rise and relative success of embedded programmer-journalists.

Extending the concept, I think we are not too far from the rise of the Editor-in-Chief/PM Director who integrates and manages editorial and tech with one vision. We see that departmentally in some newsrooms today, but they’re still the result of editors telling a few editors, programmers and designers to “go over there and conduct your little experiment.” What happens when you apply the integrated approach to an entire news organization?

I agree that journalists face challenges and have to add technological skills. I think it is worth examining the contention that all journalists should have high levels of software skills.

There have been many forums where people have dragged out the buggy whip analogy when they’re describing technologically challenged journalists as obsolete. Another analogy would be that journalists today must necessarily become more technologically skilled because the technology is still developing in unpredictable ways; an analogy would be to early drivers of automobiles, who needed to be able to crank the vehicle to start it, make minor repairs and patch tires to keep it going.

When do journalists become the drivers of today, driving sophisticated equipment without having to understand how it works or how to program it? A further question is what will be the role of the journalist in a more distant future, when technology does most of the reporting; an analogy would be the role of the driver in a partially self-driving car.

I think it’s unfortunate that journalism didn’t approach technology by teaming reporters with software specialists. It seems to me we’re requiring journalists to become generalists who are good with software and can write competently and shoot video competently and create statistical graphs competently without considering the value of subject specialization. By never using a job-sharing teamwork model, the newspaper business has discarded decades, if not centuries, worth of specialized topical experience to get reporters and editors with software skills.

There are some journalists who are technologically challenged because they chose not to learn technology. There are some journalists who are technologically challenged because the way technology works seems illogical to them. There are other journalists who needed training and didn’t receive it. There are some journalists who pursued technology as a hobby and found it helped them in their jobs. There are journalists who pursued education in dual topics and learned to create software and report, check facts and history, design news presentations and more — but are they the rule, or the exceptions?

I remain unconvinced that every journalist needs to understand everything that’s under the hood in order to drive a good story onto the Internet. I’d like to see software that allows more journalists to specialize, and a business model that provides enough funding for newsroom units that combine specialists in subject matter, technology and production to give us interesting and reliable insight into government actions and policy and the lives of people around us.

I think there’s too much advice to journalists that’s predicated on getting rid of people dependent on buggy whips in order to produce people who can drive a Model T or an Edsel. Some work for journalism sites involves writing or other forms of storytelling, other work is data entry, and some work is coding. We may need journalists who can code to get us past the Edsel stage, but there should still be plenty for traditional journalists to contribute if they’re teamed up properly.

What is the opportunity cost of having software specialists shoot video or having writers do data entry?

I’m not sure why I’m responding here, Tim. Perhaps it’s because I feel you’ve completely missed the point. The two are indeed different, for even the addition of source links or linkable references separates the two. Moreover, the ability to store parts or pieces eliminates the need for whole summaries, which is another huge difference. RSS is a delivery option thanks to the handshake, but because people like you think there’s no difference, RSS is only used to tease people for clicks, again, totally defeating its intended purpose.