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Comment by busterarm | Hacker News Reader

It's funny this came up. Before Al Jazeera shut down their American operations, I met with a number of software engineers in their employment who were embedded with news teams and whose primary responsibilities were to do journalism.

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.

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A former Al Jazeera America journalist/coder literally just published an A1 NYT investigation.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/11/09/us/internet-c...

https://mhkeller.com/

We've established, unsurprisingly, that there are journalists who can code and coders who can do good work in journalism. I'm not clear on where that gets this thread though.

Ahh, that's one of the folks I met!

Hi that is me. I do not think journalism is a dead end nor have I ever thought that. From my personal view, Al Jazeera America failed largely because of the TV and broadcast market, not its digital presence. We had a pretty good publishing system that the multimedia team, which I was on, built our own tools to integrate with. Many of them we open sourced: https://github.com/ajam

That's an interesting extrapolation of your personal experience. You think that's more likely than the widely reported explanations of why Al Jazeera America closed up shop?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Jazeera_America#Closure

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2016/01/1...

https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/hyperbole

Your example of a room full of software developers running a newsroom appears to be a newsroom that wasn't run by software developers, and which failed.

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