Along with my own big grant announcement, I'm excited about many of the other Knight News Challenge winners, most notably the grant given to Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism.
Medill received a grant to offer full journalism scholarships for geeks. Essentially, they're looking to train the next generation of journalist-programmers, and I'm really excited to see that. If you're a computer scientist looking to get into journalism (a rewarding and important field), you would do well to check out the scholarship and apply.
Comments
Posted by Gina Setser on May 24, 2007, at 9:33 p.m.:
Congratulations Adrian. This is really exciting news. Glad you are getting a shot at doing some really cool s#$%x!!!
Posted by Maurreen Skowran on May 25, 2007, at 1:34 p.m.:
This is overdue.
But I'd like to see more in the opposite direction also -- training journalists in programming.
Posted by Kathy Schwartz on May 26, 2007, at 3:41 p.m.:
I agree with Maurreen. I'm a trained journalist and dabble in Web site design but am lost when it comes to true programming and I'm tired of having to rely on other programmers to create what I envision --- it's takes too long, costs too much and the final result isn't always what I wanted.
Any chance of creating a programming program for journalists?
And congrats, Adrian.
Posted by Daniel Schultz on May 27, 2007, at 1:45 a.m.:
I completely agree, that grant definitely caught my ear during that panel.
One of the things I noticed at that conference was how so many of the people there didn't seem to realize that there are people being trained to use technology in creative ways!
Hopefully the scholarship will still be around by the time I graduate, maybe i'll even take a shot at it...
Posted by John Heasly on May 29, 2007, at 8:10 p.m.:
As a trained journalist/self-taught programmer, That's a +1 on Maurreen's hope to train journalists in programming!
While I think the seemingly default preferred approach of programmer -> journalist is kind of a back-handed slap at journalism (Don't get me wrong; I certainly think there're aspects of journalism that could use a back-handed slap), I'm thrilled that Adrian has brought attention (and money!) to the issue. Well done sir!
Posted by Maurreen Skowran on June 8, 2007, at 9:57 a.m.:
A few more ideas --
Why not have a multidisciplinary program to teach both fields at the same time at the undergraduate level?
And a program to teach programming and other technology to journalists need not follow a traditional model. People often learn programming on their own anyway, but something extra such as distance learning, part-time or short courses could give more support.
This could be a project for the next Knight round. Anyone interested in working with me on this?
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