We also, as a profession, have a real problem with the rift between our enthusiasm for the work we do and its real world complexity. An enormous chunk of all software development work could be approximated or even substituted entirely with a reasonable set of Excel spreadsheets (spreadsheets, of course, being the world's most popular software development environment); many of us spend entire careers simply plumbing one set of database columns into another set of form fields and tables. Could I teach a bunch of journalists to model a bunch of business processes in Google Sheets? Yes, I think I could.
If you think that's a laughable comparison, I'd ask you to consider whether your conception of the work of a journalist isn't akin to my hypothetical conception of the work of a software developer.
The original commenter's thought process is as absurd as a layperson bragging they could just as easily produce a functioning website with production-ready code because they've learned how to write the <link> and <script> tags needed to include Bootstrap and jQuery. It's not the code itself that makes a tech company. Just as it is not just words strung together in paragraph form that makes a news org.
And that's even not that new, already a hundred years ago there were highly successful news organizations that thrived not despite but because of bad journalism, exploiting misleading sensationalism to its full potential.
> And that's even not that new, already a hundred years ago there were highly successful news organizations that thrived not despite but because of bad journalism, exploiting misleading sensationalism to its full potential.
No argument there. And the golden era of American journalism – e.g. the 1970s to 1990s – produced great journalism and printed money for its owners (30%+ profit margins were not unheard of), but it's because established outlets had a virtual monopoly in their regions, especially newspapers (because TV/radio killed the need for evening newspapers, and in smaller cities, multiple newspapers).
But it has never been easy to create a successful/functional news org by just doing journalism. Just as it has never been easy to build a useful tech startup by creating production ready code.
The original post about journalists vs. SWEs is a comment on the content-mill, lowest common denominator nature of huge swathes of the current online publishing landscape, not about the difficulty(??) of Journalism vs. Coding or whatever.
This is an accurate description of most of the news I see. For every piece of news that's actual original journalism, there's 2 articles that essentially amount to summarizing C-Span and another 2 that are essentially blog posts. And then there's the editorial section that really is essentially a collection of blog posts.
Even reasonably well done journalism is like debugging complex technical problems, but instead of working with systems that behave in a well-defined manner, you are dealing with people and complex wetware systems. They do not behave well at all.
Journalist hunting for confirmation or corroboration of a good lead is like a software engineer doing root-cause analysis in a byzantine maze, where reliability of information is suspect and all interactions with various interfaces must be assumed adversarial. Or at best to provide wildly incomplete data.
And the final output, the article that eventually gets published? Ask yourselves: have you ever written postmortems that must make sense to an audience who do not have the technical background to understand the nuances of the problem domain? Audience who will actively try to misunderstand what you have written, and extract soundbites out of context? Could you include enough information in the postmortem to pre-emptively defuse such attempts, so that you could trivially quote a section to point out the strawman attempt?
That's what proper journalism is like. And I consider myself privileged to have worked with people that; they taught me skills I could not have picked up in the university or most workplaces.
My point being that there's a middle ground where we simply have more software folk inside, or close to, the news room. Consider that as more information is created/stored (regardless of government, corporations, or private), the requirement for collecting/parsing/cleaning through that information for the news room will become harder and harder. I'm sure some phase transition will happen, but probably not for a while.
They were trying to recruit more. This was 5 years ago. They were ahead of the curve and I think they were so ahead of the curve they realized that journalism was a dead end here and closed up shop.
Also "learn to code". heh.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/11/09/us/internet-c...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Jazeera_America#Closure
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2016/01/1...