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Comment by dlivingston | Hacker News Reader

Outside of personal blogging, in what context would a programmer need to know the fundamentals of journalism?

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.

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.

There are courses on how to speak to the media. They are aimed at CEOs, politicians etc, or anyone who might need to speak to the media. Often taught by reporters, or ex-reporters.

I’ve done one, I’d recommend it. I have rarely talked to journalists, but the skills are useful in any situation where you’re being ‘grilled’, like a job interview.

That's cool. Where are these kinds of courses generally taught?

I’d google for something like “media training for executives”. You can probably get courses in most major cities.

I see, thanks!

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?

It's not symmetrical like that. Journalists report on data based phenomena all the time, so understanding statistics is a fairly useful skill.

Programmers don't typically have to do journalism. They do have to write, but writing =/= journalism. If we're talking about writing classes for programmers, personally I don't think there's anything special about the programmer use case, as opposed to "writing in professional contexts" in general.

That seems like more of an exercise in framing.

If you currently work at the NYT as a data-science researcher, doing the job that journalists without data-science experience can’t do, and you see your job imperilled by this, you’ll want to do exactly what these journalists are doing, but in reverse: Expanding their role to something they didn’t previously do in order to stay competitive in the job market.

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