Linkdump: some more programmer-journalist resources

A while back, I wrote about my plan of self-directed study to become a programmer-journalist. Since then, I’ve started plugging away at Google’s free Python class. I’ve also come across a few articles and resources that may be helpful for others with similar ambitions.

Will Columbia-Trained, Code-Savvy Journalists Bridge the Media/Tech Divide? from Wired.com’s Epicenter blog:

Journalism schools have frantically updated their programs in the last decade or so, as it became increasingly clear that traditional, newspaper-oriented skills were no longer enough to prepare students for the real world. But even fluency in broadly defined “multimedia skills” isn’t enough, with coding becoming as crucial to the news business as knowing how to use a computer was a couple of generations ago.

Coders meet journalists; journalists meet coders by Judith Townend:

Do journalists need to learn to code? Probably not, but those who can are likely to find themselves quickly snapped up by news organisations with interactive and data teams.

I have no grand hopes of learning to code properly, but I would like to feel a little more comfortable with the language and learn more about the ways programmers work and how it could help journalism.

Coding for Journalists 101: A four-part series by Dan Nguyen. Focuses on using Ruby to scrape websites:

I set out to write some tutorials that would guide the non-coding-but-computer-savvy journalist through enough programming fundamentals so that he/she could write a web scraper to collect data from public websites.