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"Today's demand for programmer/journalists is one sign of how the Internet has changed the newsroom.  While the role has become crucial to many forward-thinking news organizations, traditional newsrooms are often still struggling to integrate programmer/journalists into their everyday workflow.\nI spoke to some programmer/journalists about their hybrid roles in news coverage.  They had much to offer about the new frontiers of journalism, and how programmer/journalists are bringing unprecedented value to both major and startup news organizations.\nThe Hybrid Role\n\n\n\n\u201CSome stories are just better told as databases and interactive web apps,\u201D said Adrian Holovaty, founder of the neighborhood news site EveryBlock, which was funded by a Knight News Challenge grant and acquired by MSNBC.com in August.  He explained by e-mail that \u201Cnewspapers already understand that photography tells a story in a different way, and video tells a story in a different way, and those subdisciplines are well established in news companies. But custom Web apps haven\u2019t crossed that chasm in newsroom culture yet.\u201D\nMike Davidson, CEO of Newsvine, which was acquired by MSNBC.com in 2007, said he was initially more interested in the tech side, but become more vested in the storytelling process. It\u2019s increasingly hard to separate the two roles, he added.\n\u201CWe\u2019re beginning to discover new ways to tell stories,\u201D said Davidson.\nMarcel Levy is a bioinformatics specialist who was the Senior Editor of Digital Media at the Reno Gazette-Journal and created the News Code group on Wired Journalists, a Publish2 network.\nHe said that those who think of themselves as journalists first will always be thinking of the larger picture.  Those who think of themselves as programmers who happen to work at a newspaper may not be serving anyone very well.\nHolovaty added that people who love information don\u2019t tend to get frustrated by changes in journalism because for them, it\u2019s still just information.  The problem for media companies is finding and recruiting these people because they have job opportunities in many other fields.\n\u201CI\u2019ve only met a handful of people who became journalists because they like information. And I think that helps explain why there have been some major cultural issues in the journalism world in the age of the Internet,\u201D he said.\nIntegration in the Newsroom\n\n\n\nProgrammer/journalists need to have initiative, a thick skin and a relatively outgoing personality, said Levy.\n\u201CIf you come up with ideas, or insist that you get involved with project planning from the start, you can help everyone else understand not only the limits of the technology, but also the capabilities they didn\u2019t even know existed,\u201D he said in an e-mail interview.\nSree Sreenivasan is the Dean of Student Affairs at Columbia University\u2019s Graduate School of Journalism where he teaches digital journalism, and is also a contributing editor at the hyperlocal startup DNAinfo.com. He has seen firsthand how important it is for both the journalism side and the programming side to work closely together.\nOnly in recent years has there been an understanding of the value of people who can speak both languages, according to Sreenivasan.\n\u201COne of the things we\u2019ve seen [is that] many engineers want to change the world and that\u2019s a common characteristic with journalists \u2026 changing systems and making them better,\u201D he said.\n\u201CJournalists these days spend more time thinking about what they\u2019ve traditionally done and how they can survive, and not enough on the simple question of what people want,\" Holovaty said.  \"Put aside any legacy baggage and ask: What information needs aren\u2019t being filled?\u201D\nIntelligent Automation\n\nAt a time when news organizations are facing economic hardship, the programmer/journalist could help add value without requiring additional resources.\n\u201CHire a developer to make a couple of Web apps that run themselves ... and you\u2019ve expanded your media company\u2019s product offerings without adding to the staff\u2019s daily workload,\u201D Holovaty said.\n\u201CThe newsrooms I\u2019ve worked in have many inefficiencies that a good developer would balk at and a great developer would see as a huge opportunity. Having a programmer in the newsroom is a great way to kill some of those inefficiencies.\u201D\nInteractives, Applications, and Tools\n\nAron Pilhofer, editor of Interactive News at The New York Times, has a team that has completed about 60 projects since the group was formed in 2007. He said the projects differ by scale and scope and fit into three categories: data-driven interactives, news applications and newsroom tools.\n\n\nAn example of this project type is the Word Train, an interactive user-generated tag cloud reflecting people\u2019s state of mind on Election Day.\nThe Word Train generated more than 250,000 page views and 73,000 words were submitted in 18 hours, according to a Times project document.\n\n\nNews applications, which are sites built around events or to compliment coverage, are generally made to have a longer shelf-life. These projects may be updated for weeks or months, or they may have no specific end date.\nExamples of this type of project are the Represent tool and the Guantanamo Docket. Represent lets New York City residents find their elected officials at local, state and federal levels and provides an aggregated activity feed about what those officials are doing.\nIt\u2019s a \u201Cpersonal feed aggregated in one place to give you a cross-section of news you couldn\u2019t get any other way,\u201D Pilhofer said.\nThe team launched Guantanamo Docket, the first database of its type with public documents on each of the 779 detainees.\n\u201CIt has become the definition about that kind of information about detainees,\u201D Pilhofer said.\n\n\nThe third category includes newsroom tools that The Times built to solicit and incorporate user-generated photos into news coverage. He said the tool was completed the same day US Airways flight 1549 landed in the Hudson River so they were able to use it for that breaking news story.\nHow to Measure Success\n\nPilhofer said metrics such as page views are least important to him in determining a project\u2019s success.  He measures it the way any editor would: Did we succeed in telling the story? Are we having the impact we intended?\n\u201CI think those are extremely blunt instruments when you measure the success or failure of a particular [project],\u201D he said. \u201CI think the metrics I care about are more qualitative than quantitative.\u201D\nHe added that the metrics are useful in seeing how a web application is used.  They allow journalists to make small changes that have an immediate impact.\nThis immediacy makes it easy for news organizations to see the value that programmer/journalists bring to their publications, and solidifies their place as a mainstay in the new media newsroom.\nMore journalism resources from Mashable:\n- 8 Must-Have Traits of Tomorrow's Journalist- 10 Ways Journalism Schools Are Teaching Social Media- The Journalist's Guide to Twitter- Why NPR is the Future of Mainstream Media- Social Journalism: Past, Present, and Future- Everything I Need to Know About Twitter I learned in J School\nImage courtesy of iStockphoto, Phaif"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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