Is it necessary to learn how to program? Latin American journalists respond

"As in life, the only constant in journalism is change."

Venezuelan data journalist Katherine Pennacchio asked several Latin American journalists if it was necessary to learn to program.

Pennacchio coordinates the newsletter in Spanish for the Latam Journalism Review and publishes articles on the present and future of the profession, with a special focus on Latin America.

For a long time, there has been a special interest in data journalism, new narratives, and, above all, taking advantage of digital tools in an increasingly digitized world.

This has opened a window into data journalism, data visualization, web development, and more recently, artificial intelligence.

"Learning to write code seems to be a crucial skill for journalists in newsrooms that are increasingly digitized and integrated. Knowing about languages such as Java, Python, HTML or R allows the development of web pages or applications, the management and analysis of large databases, and the creation of interactive visualizations," writes Pennacchio.

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Thinking in code

"Thinking in code is nothing more than understanding how the platforms we use daily to publish and distribute the content you generate work so that you can get the most out of it."

The quote belongs to the Spanish journalist Lydia Aguirre, who adds that thinking like machines think, knowing the structures, formats, and processes of your media's content manager "will allow you to save precious time and save it for your colleagues on the technical team."

But some of the journalists consulted do not speak of an obligation to learn to program but of achieving communication between the work of a developer and the journalist.

We must not fall into the hype that all journalists must necessarily learn to program. Rather, they should understand programming, says Andrés Snitcofsky, an Argentine graphic designer.

The interviewees agree that more than learning to program a certain language, it is about being open and available to continue learning skills that allow them to do better journalism.

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Depends on the approach

Journalist Paul Steiger spoke in an interview about the model adopted by the US independent news agency ProPublica: journalists who know how to program as well as report.

"We are in a process where we are finding more journalists who can program, as well as write and report. For the more complicated data operations you need specialists, but even they think more like journalists," Steiger said.

ProPublica is a successful example of investigative journalism where working with large amounts of data and visualizing the findings has become crucial.

But it is not the case for all. Some of those consulted explain that deciding whether or not to learn programming depends on the journalistic approach that one wants to follow.

"(Programming) can perhaps help you do some freelance work, but programming is a very dense career," explains Venezuelan journalist Ángel Rivero.

The independent journalist Daniel González Cappa agrees with this and assures that programming is useful but not vital in the journalistic field.

“Programming can range from scrapping to web development, statistical analysis, data visualization, and front-developing. Knowing how to code might give you new job opportunities as a data analyst or developer, but those jobs aren't necessarily journalism. Journalism is still reporting, contrasting sources, context, etc,” he opines.

But what do developers think about the growing number of journalists learning code? Learning to program is not an easy task and it requires time and dedication.

"Knowing how to program will open up new job opportunities for journalists, but it will also depend on how they want to focus their career," says data analyst Raúl Echezuria. "But you have to be resilient to frustrations because the learning curve is steep.”

You can read the whole post in Spanish here.