Rich Gordon: Putting programmers in newsrooms now a mainstream idea

Northwestern University | MediaShift
The Knight Foundation will give Northwestern’s Medill journalism school $250,000 over three years for scholarships so that at least six people with computer-science backgrounds can get master’s degrees in journalism. In announcing the new round of funding, Medill professor Rich Gordon writes that in the four years since Knight first gave Medill $639,000 for the program, the idea of bringing programmers into the newsroom has become mainstream. “More and more, journalism is code-based,” John S. Bracken, the Knight Foundation’s director of media innovation, says in a news release. Gordon describes what the first nine scholarship winners are doing now. Short version: They’re all employed. And judging by a list of current openings, if 48 news developers materialized out of thin air, they’d all have jobs too. || Earlier: 4 factors critical to the future of programming and journalism