I have less than great communications skills but have had great experience pairing with people who have good skills. Eg to give corporate seminars we both go onstage and the partner will structure the talk and interrupt me/clarify if I blur over something/watch for the audience’s reaction.

As a parallel, maybe journalists should pair with subject matter people (even subject matter generalists) rather than have them as “sources”. There are of course people who are great at both things (your Nate Silvers) but the whole process might be cheaper and more efficient if, gee, the New York Times would have a couple onstaff PhD economists (not star columnists) that sit in the newsroom trying to give shape to the facts about to be reported, side by side with journalists.

Nice tip! I found this:

https://www.poynter.org/reporting-editing/2006/fifty-writing...

And it links to a book on the topic too.

> Roy Peter Clark... whittled down almost thirty years of experience in journalism, writing, and teaching into a series of fifty short essays on different aspects of writing

As a former journalist, yes and no. When I first started, my company treated me to a 1 week internal course, that was very good. As I recall, there was a day on story structure - news leads v feature, pyramid, delayed drop etc. A day on the basics of law for journalism - libel and the like. A day on interviewing and keeping transcripts. A day on ethics,, on the record, off the record, non-attributable. There was also a dy on what subs do - headline writing and the like. All in in all a good, very useful grounding.

When running a startup, and you either want the press to talk to you, or the press decides that you're an interesting story.

Larger companies have PR people to handle that kind of thing. In a startup, though, it could easily be a programmer who talks to the press, because there isn't anyone else.

Communication skills would be a prerequisite for journalist skills, and I see the front page of Hacker News filled with discussions on communication skills every other day.

Small things like putting the executive summary on top, starting every speech/article/email with a hook that tells the user why they care, etc. If a bunch of coders could master those skills, and combine it with data analysis and web design skills, then they could become a force that can compete with the mainstream media.

Time for me to learn jQuery and create a startup.

Why would journalists need to know data science?

The skills of a good journalist — interviewing, elicitation, focus on critical details, and the ability to build a compelling story — are skills that /anyone/ should find valuable. But a developer or architect responsible for product, process, or service design should find it particularly useful when interviewing users and stakeholders and determining functional and experiential design.