Earlier I wrote a piece about using algorithms to help with your journalism, spurred on by this piece in Wired. Now I want to cover more the area that the piece mentions: Using algorithms to actually write stories.

I’ve actually written something that does this. It’s hosted on Github and I’ve got a tutorial for setting it up. I call it FireTracker.

This isn’t a new idea, and I’ve written about it before. Yet only a handful of news organizations have anything like this set up.

The Los Angeles Times is probably one of the better known organizations that does this. The Homicide Report pulls in a spreadsheet, writes a basic story and posts it. It’s like a mad lib, or so Ben Welsh describes in this awesome video.

Crime L.A. pulls in data and runs automatic analyses of every neighborhood. These were big data projects that news organizations used to do maybe once a year that can now be done as often as you want, as long as you’re receiving the data.

Clearly these projects are worthwhile — they are good journalism, they save journalist’s time and they give our audience more information and context. So why aren’t we doing them?

I would say the main problem is our newsrooms don’t have the bodies or the technological know-how. But in rebuttal, I bet 150 years ago we didn’t have many photographers or dark rooms at our offices, either. That didn’t stop places from setting up photo staffs, did it?

Journalistic web development is still young, but we’ve been putting our content online for almost 15 years. We need to catch up and start developing a product online that matches the times we’re in. This is not going to happen at our schools — although they will help somewhat — but we will have to teach ourselves.

If you’re a hiring manager and you have a few slots open for reporters, maybe you should look for people who are in the civic coder realm instead, like Code for America. While I’m sure everyone wishes they had a few more reporters or editors, I would contend it’s a better business decision to invest in more web developers.

I view most of journalism as solving problems. You need to identify the guy was who was murdered, you need to know how much in donations that candidate received this quarter, you need to find an eye-witness to some awesome event. A web developer is just another person who can help you solve problems. Wouldn’t you want more around?

This morning a story from Wired made the homepage of Hacker News. It was about a company that can take in data, run it through a program and spit out a basic news story. The company has been written about before, and when it first bounced around journalism blog-o-circle-sphericals I had meant to write something about it.

This company is doing what we should be doing more of: Automation. Journalists tend to do a lot of work on daily tasks that could be automated. I’m going to give you an example from my younger days as a reporter, something I’m sure many journalists can relate to.

It was early 2007, a year before that photo up there was taken. I was a cops reporter at the Daily Nebraskan, my college newspaper. Three or four times a week I would head to the city/county building complex for crime information. First you would look through a a stack of overnight reports from the sheriff’s office and you’d note any interesting cases. Then the Lincoln/Lancaster County morning media briefing would begin.

Officers would hand you a print-off with everyone arrested overnight and a brief summary (less characters than a tweet) of the crime committed. The assembled reporters — from television, radio and print — would comb through the thick stack and ask questions about interesting crimes. The public information officer would look things up, read off arrest reports and give us information (They often had to do this for legal reasons, if I recall, because open investigative documents aren’t public. Hence the need for someone to read it to you). Sometimes the police chief would appear and tip us off to stories or give context. Someone from the sheriff’s office would wander in and do the same.

My job was to do normal stories that affected campus and students. But I also had to scan the list of everyone arrested and check for anyone who was 18 to 22, prime college ages. Mondays briefing was huge because it included information from Friday night through Sunday, prime collegiate boozing time. I would head back to the newspaper and start typing these names into the unl.edu student directory and Facebook, seeing if I got a match. If I did, I’d circle them on my list.

Then I would sometimes hand the list to the sports department and have them scan the names for “important people,” namely athletes. If there were any, I’d note the name.  I would then call the public information officer and ask about each case. The officer usually had listed whether they were a student or not, as that would be listed as their occupation. This was a nice way to double-check these were indeed students and thus worthy of our coverage.

I’d take the information and either write up individual full articles or throw them into a cops brief column, attempting to get comment from the students. I did this daily. So did/does someone at the Lincoln Journal Star. So did/do probably thousands of journalists across the country.

And it’s incredibly inefficient.

Almost everything I did to identify people on the list was something a computer could have done. Instead of an hour of my time, a computer could do it in 10 seconds. It could give me a list of everyone whose name and perhaps date of birth information matched and other information we entered in about them. Then I could still do my reporting and writing, some of which can’t be replaced by an algorithm, but I’d have taken a bit of the hunting and scanning aspect out of it.

These are the steps to follow at your news organization in order to do this:

• Daily data from the police department in a format I could ingest
• Enter the “important names” into a list
• Writing a program to match the names and also find people college-aged

I think the first part would be the hardest. But maybe not in Lincoln, as their police chief was one of the data-savviest people I’ve ever encountered in my life. Tom Casady, now Lincoln’s public safety director, has blogged for years about data and other musings. He once gave me about 10 years of geocoded crime data for free. You won’t find many heads of departments like him, I gather.

Convincing your public safety officials to get you this data will take some time and some tact. You could present it as a cost-saving measure — less printed pages means less cost to their department (unless they’re requiring your news organization to foot the bill, of course). But odds are they are already emailing themselves this sort of data. They just need to add your news organization to the list.

Finding the important names may be something you will have to undertake yourself. From past experience in trying to set up something similar at a previous job in 2009 (wherein I failed to get the project going), you should just take initiative and build a list yourself. Add everyone you can think of, from city/county council members, important business persons, head of local institutions, sports teams, etc.

Lastly, you will need to write the program. This I can’t help you with. Thankfully, at least one news organization already does this and has brains you can pick. Ben Welsh from the Los Angeles Times already did just this. He talks about that and lots of other awesome ideas in this amazing video.

Seriously. Watch that video if you haven’t. Do it now. I’ll be writing a second post on this topic that he also touches on in the video.

What does a project like this do? It takes a bit of the daily grind off your back, allowing you to do other reporting. If I had done this project while I was still in college, I probably would’ve still attended the morning briefings. But even if it saved me an hour a day, that’s five hours a week, or 12.5 percent of your time. That’s a lot. In one year, five hours a week adds up to 6.5 weeks a year.

Wouldn’t you rather have that time to do other reporting? I sure would.

Have you tried this? Would you be willing to try it? What problems do you see that I don’t? Let me know what you think in the comments.

Photo by Jay Carlson, via Facebook.

A little history first: In the early days of News Organizations On The Internet, your content went into a content management system. It was probably clunky (probably still is), hard to customize and maybe even harder to rebrand different sections. Your stories went into this CMS, sometimes through a pagination system, then you added a photo, maybe a video. You clicked a button and poof, story on the internet. But what if you wanted to set up a special corner, call it “Mary the Margarita Maven” and have someone review the town’s margaritas? Not so easy to do with your current setup.

Enter blogs. They were their own content management systems: Moveable Type, TypePad, WordPress, whatever they were called, they made it easy for news organization to quickly throw up different content that maybe didn’t fit the traditional “news” role. Maybe it was opinionated, maybe it was about inside decision-making processes, maybe it was cute cat photos. Or margarita reviews, whatever. These content management systems were, on the whole, like the ones your news organizations used originally, just programmed with different backends and usually easier-to-use. And sometimes this content didn’t go into the newspaper/broadcast — it was “online-only” and meant to entice people to your web product.

Sadly, blogs brought along a stigma that people still use  – which is wrong — that they’re done by people in their pajamas in a basement somewhere. Blogs are not the same as regular news content, some media folks thought, because they weren’t in your “main” CMS. They had a wall between them and they are different. They may even be branded differently, with a different header and logo. They weren’t the same as regular content because they were in a different system! Right?

Wrong.

It’s time to stop bifurcating your content as blogs and news because they run on separate systems. It is all content, so why not call it that? Even if you have outside people writing posts on your website that are unmoderated by your staff — that’s still content that’s part of your media outlet’s website. I don’t have any research proving this, but in my short journalism career many media outlets just slapped the name “blog” on something because it lived in a different CMS. We should stop this. Please.

You have a crime blog? A doggy blog? Maybe a sports blog? Wonderful! I bet you gave it a cool name, like Crime Watch, Fido’s Place and Sports Gal. All you have to do is stop calling it the Crime Watch blog. And the Fido’s Place blog. And the Sports Gal blog. Just say “Check out Crime Watch for more crime coverage.” Or whatever.

If it’s opinion content, call it that. If it’s news content, great! That’s what it is. Start thinking of it all as content as opposed to “this is a blog post” and “this is a news story.” If you copied a news story and pasted it into a blog post, DOES IT SOMEHOW CHANGE? No. It does not.

I know calling things “blogs” has some cultural cachet, as if a blog is somehow more up-to-date than your normal news content. But again, that’s probably because your main content management system is clunky and slow and the new “blog” is super duper fast. That’s a silly reason to distinguish between the content. Did you credit photos taken with digital cameras instead of film in a different way? Of course you didn’t (I hope). You can change people’s thinking on this — why distinguish one part of your content as fast and the other as slow? Stop it.

Let’s work on making our systems more integrated and faster. Help your readers come to realize that all of your content is fast and awesome. It’ll take some rebranding work, sure, but I bet our industry is capable of it.

So embrace your content, people. Give it a hug and a pat on the head and maybe a slice of pizza. Welcome it into your news community. I apologize for any rebranding you may have to do, but trust me, it’s going to be worth it in the long run.

UPDATE: Hey new visitors! Feel free to yell at me on Twitter (@andymboyle) or comment below. I’d love to hear your thoughts. 

The basic idea is this: Use the data of what people click on with Google AdWords/Microsoft’s adCenter to help you come up with coverage. First, you set up advertisements for a certain area of coverage, say an upcoming convention in your town, or maybe you’re trying to allocate resources between two not-as-often-covered sports teams and not sure which has a greater audience. Then you send those ads to a landing page or article you’ve already written about said topic.

You can then see how many people clicked through the ads, what the bounce rate was, how long they stayed on the article/landing page (using your own embedded analytics, of course) and whether or not they explored more of your website. Then you can deduce whether one subject or another received more page views than the other, all for maybe $100 in advertisement costs (plus the time it took to set up the pages).

Now, say you were planning on hiring a beat reporter to cover one subject over another, I would say that $100 is a cheap price to make sure you’ve made a good decision for your audience.

This may smack in the idea of what I’ve heard some people freak out about, which is catering too much to your audience. Giving them their chocolate cake instead of the peas and carrots they should (says we) be eating. Well, with dwindling resources at many media organizations, I can’t see why it’s a bad idea to gauge your audience before starting a new venture.

Our industry could use more analysis in making decisions, I believe, and thankfully we have a lot of tools at our disposal.

And if anyone is already doing this, I’d love to hear how it’s faired in the comments.

***edit at 10:51 a.m.***

Ted Han has pointed me to this post about how Homicide Watch uses analytics for coverage, which is totally rad. Laura Amico used her site’s analytics as a reporting tool. Awesome.

If you’re a person who has these skill sets, you should really think about applying. Where else can you get to build awesome projects that will be most likely seen by hundreds of thousands of people (at some of these news organizations)? Where else will you build news applications that can do some good for the world? Where else can you jump in and try to help revive an entire industry?

Not many places. If you don’t have journalism experience, that’s cool. Most journalists didn’t have it either when they decided to become journalists, so I’m sure most places won’t mind. Odds are if you’ve worked in any sort of a web development environment that required you to have the skills necessary to do great work for a news company. Can you communicate well? Do you do agile development? Can someone tell you “we want these features” and you can do them? Yes?

Then you’ve got most of the skill sets needed to succeed at newspapers. Sure, you may have to deal with some bureaucracy just like any large company. And you may need to fight a bit to start using some newer technologies. But as many organizations have shown, you can succeed. You can make great changes. You can kick ass and take names.

We need you, folks. So start applying.

The big problem with learning how to do this stuff is you need to know a little about a lot just to get a basic project off the ground. And not every tutorial tells you that you need to know X, Y and Z. Therefore, I’ll try to mention all the things you should get some basic reading up on.

But before I start babbling, you need to know that I come at this with a bias toward the programming framework called Django. Just because I like Django does not mean you have to like it.  When possible, I will point out other frameworks/languages you can and should check out. The important thing to remember is that you can get the job done using many different tools. It’s your job to find the one that’s best suited for you.

[edit] Oh, and here’s the tl;dr from Brian Boyer of the skills to learn:

Server ops, SQL, a scripting language (Python, etc.), MVC + templating (Django, etc.) HTML, CSS, JavaScript + libraries (JQuery, etc.)

Just FYI.[/edit]

And here’s a cool graphic, called Engineering The Internet, that’s also a good primer.

Now that that’s out of the way, let’s begin!

SO THE INTERNET SORT OF REALLY IS A SERIES OF TUBES

Did I just blow your mind? Okay, well, in order to build anything on the internet, you need to know how the damn thing works. This is a simple tutorial that can explain it to you. You can also scroll down to “How The Internet Works” in this post for an even more layman’s version.

The basics are this: You’ve got servers. On them are databases. A website is basically a database that your computer is asking to talk to. Your browser renders the code that makes the website look pretty.

So the basic areas you need to understand in order to get a project live are this: Servers, databases and website code.

Let’s start with the code on the website. When you go to a website — like this one — something makes it look pretty. You may have heard of this. The basic building blocks are HTML and CSS. If you right click on the page and hit “view source,” the stuff that pops up is the HTML, or hypertext markup language.

After viewing the source, on line 11 you’ll see a link to this stuff. That’s the CSS. It basically makes it quick and easier to style stuff. So instead of writing “make the background of this box red, make the font of any text in it size 14 and make this box 300 pixels wide,” you just call something you previously defined.

This follows one of the basic rules of programming: Don’t Repeat Yourself. You could program something without CSS, which is called using inline styles, such as on this amazing website, but you’d be repeating things over and over. Hence the use of CSS, which stands for cascading style sheets.

So these are some basic building blocks you should learn. You don’t have to be a master at it — I’m certainly not. But you need to know the rudimentary basics so you can chat with more experienced folks and learn from them. Oh, and you could try this tutorial, or countless others on the internet.

DATABASES AND STUFF

So knowing HTML/CSS will show you how to make flat websites where basically every individual page has to be hand-coded. Think the internet from 1997. (This should refresh your memory.) Another way websites work is by hitting databases, asking for information and spitting it out on a page. This blog — most blogs, really — work this way.

Think of it like this: Each part of a blog post, or a story on a newspaper website, is made up of different parts. A headline, byline, text field, related links, etc. All of that is stored in a big spreadsheet, basically. And the website is programmed in such a way that when it sees www.thiswebsitewhatever.com/2011/04/22/best-cat-photos it knows to pull information for that post or story.

So you need to learn the basics of something called SQL, which is the language most databases talk. It stands for “structured query language,” just so you know. A basic line looks like:

 SELECT * FROM awesome_pet_names WHERE pet="cat"

That may be rusty. But basically, you talk to a table named awesome_pet_names, asking for every thing in it where the field “pet” has the word “cat” in it. That’s a basic SQL query, and that’s more or less how the entire internet runs. Especially the part about cats.

SQL is also used a lot in database-oriented journalism, so it doesn’t hurt to know. Here’s a good place to start learning some of the basics. The wonderful Derek Willis suggests one should read this book, The Art of SQL by Stephane Faroult, which is more advanced.

OKAY SO WEBSITES ARE MORE THAN HTML, RIGHT?

OMG you’re learning so fast! Yes, they are more than that. Instead of writing our websites in SQL queries, most of us write them in what’s called a server-side scripting language. These are languages that talk to the server, hit the database and spit out data onto websites. Some examples include Python (some don’t agree), Perl, Ruby and PHP. Python is what powers Django, Ruby powers Ruby on Rails and PHP can be used on its own. This blog is written in PHP, for instance. Other folks may use Java, which a lot of the internet is built on.

Also, don’t learn Perl. Just trust me. (This is where I point out that many web developers have silly biases against programming languages that are usually pointless and silly.)

Before diving into a framework, I would highly suggest learning the basics of PHP and how it interacts with MySQL, which is database software, among the most common on the internet. A good book is Head First PHP and MySQL. It teaches you the basics and it doesn’t get too boring. You can also find some good tutorials online.

Once you get the basics of PHP down, I suggest learning how to install WordPress and setting up your own blog on your own server. Which we shall now sort of discuss.

HOW DO YOU MAKE A WEBSITE DO?

I’ve always maintained that the hardest part about making a website is setting it to run on a server. So if you make cats_rule.php that lists your favorite cats, you want it to live somewhere that people can see. Just so you’re aware, if you’re lucky enough to work at a place that has server operations people — server ops, ops, whatever they get called — you may not have to deal with this stuff as much. But it certainly doesn’t hurt to learn it.

So, a server runs on an operating system, just like your computer. One that I prefer is Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, which is one of many variations of Linux, an open source operating system that people work on out of the goodness of their hearts. Or you could use Windows Server, which was made by people who want you to have to pay lots of money to use it. Not that making money is bad or anything, but I tend to go with free stuff made by people who want to help the world.

The server, which has that operating system I mentioned, has to actually live somewhere. For many, many years, the only way you could really run a server was to either build your own box or rent space somewhere. Or have awesome ops people who set up stuff in a server room.

You may have heard of this “cloud” thing. Basically, big companies like Amazon have so much server space that they had a bunch left over that they can turn into virtual machines. Instead of making an individual physical server, they just partition their hardware to make multiple versions.

This means you can set up stuff really easy. This also means you can store media really cheap, too. I would suggest using either Amazon Web Services or Rackspace. They are both relatively cheap, with their cheapest server space costing about $10ish a month. Rackspace may be a bit easier because you don’t have to deal with ssh keys, so perhaps start out with that.

You can also use webfaction, which is about $10 a month. What’s awesome is they do a lot of the server setup for you. And you won’t really have to do much server setup, which I explain in a few grafs. So, webfaction is an option, so are many others.

My Django tutorials walk through some of the software you need to install if you’re making a Django-y project, but you basically need server software for your server, despite what you’re coding is. Apache is the standard one many people use. It’s open source and nice. I’m a bit fancier, so I use nginx. Whatever you prefer, it’s just another tool to get the job done. It works alright with PHP/MySQL.

BUT HOW DO I CONNECT TO MY SERVER?

This is where you learn about FTP, SFTP and SSHing into your server. FTP and SFTP are two ways of uploading/deleting/changing files on your live server. SFTP is much more secure than FTP, and other news developers will make fun of you if you use FTP. It’s not necessarily wrong, it’s just not as safe. And if you’re learning, no reasons to not use FTP for now.

But before that, you need to know how to ssh into your server. This involves using the terminal, which is scary for some folks. It’s all text, with no shiny buttons to click. Yet this is the most powerful part of your computer. If you’re using Windows, download PuTTY and scroll down in this link. If you’re using Apple products, then search for Terminal and open it then follow the instructions sort of here. If you’re using Ubuntu, why are you reading this?

Before you can FTP, you need to set up software on the server to let you FTP in. Here’s a quick walk-through of installing vsftpd, which is FTP software. Boom. Now you can FTP into shit. You’re welcome.

SO WHAT ABOUT THESE FRAMEWORKS?

Frameworks are sweet. They make it easier to quickly develop the web. I use Django, like I previously said. If you want to get the intense walk-through of setting up Django — INCLUDING LEARNING ABOUT SERVERS! — you can go through my almost-finished tutorial starting here. You can also go through the creator of Djangos’ own tutorials here.

If you want to learn more about Ruby (but not making websites), the wonderful Dan Nguyen has some great walk-throughs here. This could be a good Rails walk-through. Who knows.

So that’s some basic info on frameworks. If you want more, use The Googles.

BUYING DOMAINS AND STUFF

If you’re going to set up a website, you need to learn how to buy a domain. My pal Emily Ingram walks you through how to use GoDaddy.com to buy them at this page. That’s what I use, but I would definitely suggest you do NOT use them for hosting. Do not do not do not. You can use other service providers to buy .coms, but hey, it’s quick and easy. (Edit: You should use Namecheap.com instead of the previously mentioned godaddy. Just do it.)

Just remember to set your .com’s DNS settings to point toward your server, which is stuff you get to learn on your own, because I am getting tired from explaining the entire internet to you, my dearest friend.

MORE FRONT-END STUFF OTHER THAN CSS/HTML

Now, you may have learned that HTML/CSS stuff. But guess what? There’s more! Javascript and Ajax are neat.

Just so you’re aware, lots of places are looking for people to be kick-ass at Javascript and CSS/HTML. They call this front-end development, because it mostly deals with stuff that happens on the client side, aka in your browser. My  main focus, and all that stuff about PHP and Django and servers and whatnot, is backend development.

Javascript, and its widely used library jQuery, are what lots of the cool internets are built out of. When you click on something on a webpage, and it moves, or changes color, or slides around, usually that’s Javascript/jQuery. These are things totally worth learning. Basic Javascript tutorials can be found here. Here’s the page for jQuery, which also includes tutorials. Here’s even more in-depth stuff for jQuery. A good Javascript book I’ve been going through is Head First Javascript.

This includes learning about stuff like Ajax, which basically allows you to reload stuff on the page by hitting the server without having to actually load a new page. Think about how when you’re on Facebook and it pops up, saying your Aunt Glady Crapplebottom just liked that photo of those new shoes you bought. That’s Ajax. Learn about some of it here.

These are skills I need to get better at, as they allow you to make awesome web graphics. People who are good at this stuff make me envious, because it’s like they can somehow do magic. Wouldn’t you like to know magic? Yes you would. So figure it out, folks.

SO NOW YOU OBVIOUSLY KNOW EVERYTHING

Okay. This was nowhere near an exhaustive list. I apologize. I didn’t realize what a monumental task this would be. I know I’ve forgotten stuff, so hopefully nice/mean people will write in the comments about other sites, and I’ll update this post with their wonderful suggestions.

If you’re going into this, it’s also good to keep up to speed on the goings-on in the tech world. You can do that by checking Hacker News every once in awhile. It’s a pretty good site. Another good place to look for answers to questions is Stack Overflow.

Get an account at github and start looking at other people’s code. That’ll be the best way to learn, honestly. And odds are if you’re going to make a project, someone else has already made something similar and they’ve put up free code for you to use. So search for it, figure out how someone else made the similar project and incorporate it into your own.

Join the NICAR listserv. This is the National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting. Lots of news developers lurk on the NICAR-L, as we call it. And you get to join the Investigative Reporters and Editors, or IRE, which is also a great organization that you should already be a member of. Why aren’t you? JOIN TODAY.

Also, the most important thing you need to learn is that someone has probably had the same error or problem you’re having while building something. So either you can read the official docs — something I am known to not do and then Derek Willis yells at me — or just Google the error. Sometimes people post similar questions/answers on various message boards or Stack Overflow. If all else fails, tweet at some of us news developers on Twitter.

Most of us learned what we learned through the helpfulness of others, so we’re glad to help others learn more.

HOLY CRAP YOU MADE IT THIS FAR? NOW WHAT?

First off, crack open a beer, because you’re probably thinking OMGWTFLOL THAT IS SO MUCH CRAP. Well, yeah. Making the internet is kind of hard. Hell, it is hard. But it’s a little less emotionally draining than most traditional journalism jobs. And the first time you get something to work, I guarantee you will throw your arms up and shout, “YES!”

Every time I make something work, I feel as though I have reinvented fire. It’s a great feeling, and it’s especially great when you can show someone else the tools of the trade. So if you decide to go down this path, please be vocal about what you’re working on. Write about it. Explain how you did stuff. Be social.

So here’s what you do. Come up with a project. It can be as simple as making a website that tracks the movies or books you own. (FYI, I already made that. See here.) You can even go more advanced, perhaps making something that scrapes all the legislative votes in your state. Hell, go even super easy: Just learn how to use Google Fusion Tables to make something like this.

The point is, go out and make something. Then let us know how you do it. If you get stuck, ask us for help. We’d be glad to see you kick some ass.

One of the reasons for this difficulty, I believe, is because journalism students are not learning the necessary skills during their college years and internships to meet the minimum requirements of these jobs. Now, I’m not going to blame the schools in this area entirely, as most of the news developers I know are either mostly self-taught or had only a little encouragement from their institution of higher education.

So this is an issue, methinks, of students probably wanting to get more traditional journalistic jobs, from reporter to copy editor to photographer to page designer to whatever. Your standard bread and butter gigs, the ones that are needed to put out that daily (or weekly) piece of paper with ink. That’s great, and at one point in my life that’s all I wanted more than anything.

When I first got into journalism, I decided I was either going to be the next Chuck Klosterman or Bob Woodward. This made sense until I realized that most journalism students were also attempting to head down a similar — or more traditional — journalistic career path. Combine that with The Great Journalism Job Repression of the late 2000s, and you had a lot of people — some of them experts in their field — looking for the same kinds of jobs.

Because my land-grant institution required me to take a few economic classes, I understand how price and demand works. You have a lot of one thing (journalistic talent) and a lowered demand. This means lower prices (salaries) and a lot of unsold goods (unemployment).

I respond to incentives, just like everyone else. Post-graduation employment was a big incentive. So I made a conscious decision to find something in the market that was a scarcity. First it was computer-assisted reporting, because not many people had these skills and I thought it’d set me apart. Then it turned into web development, a field fewer were involved in.

Before I explain the economic incentives more, let me give you some of my back story. I spent my final few years of college focusing on online-oriented journalism, from shooting and editing video and audio to learning most of the basic content management systems. Then I graduated, was hired full-time during an internship at the St. Petersburg Times and was put to work covering the early morning cops shift.

So how and why did I go from a reporter who knocks on doors after murders and shootings to someone who sets up servers and works with databases? For one thing, covering the cops beat is emotionally draining, which is a topic I will focus on in a later essay. But another part is that my background in computer-assisted reporting pushed me to find new ways to present my normally word-focused stories online.

And let’s not deny a major component of my jumping to web development: My ego. Like always, I wanted to do what the cool kids were doing. And at the St. Pete Times, some of the cool people were building PolitiFact, MugShots, HomeTeam and the like. So I started helping out when I could, pitched a few ideas and occasionally got time away from cops reporting and general assignment work to build a few projects.

From there I learned how to program a basic project in Django, which means setting up the databases, making the project talk to a server and then spitting out data on a page. Others would help with the design-side of the projects — I just made the damn things work. Then at a later job with The New York Times Regional Media Group, I got to understand more about the project management aspects of web-oriented work, including dealing with multiple stakeholders, doing quality assurance tests and designing projects according to specifications.

But most importantly, this work was still interesting. Instead of interviewing folks and finding new sources, I was discovering new technologies, finding tools that let me do what words couldn’t. The news application community is also very active on the internet, especially Twitter, quick to answer questions you may have. Some have been more than willing to double-check my code and offer suggestions. Similar groups exist in traditional journalism, of course, but I’ve always liked how the web development community focuses on education and training of one another.

Oh, and let’s not forget that the copy desk has yet to call me at 10:30 p.m. since I moved to web development.

Now, I know this probably isn’t much of an incentive to you, oh youthful journalism students of the world. You’re employed, Andy. Neato. Way to go, etc. But I thought I’d talk about something that you don’t really hear about during your schooling: Salaries.

Let me start off by saying that money isn’t everything, folks. But when you graduate you’ll quickly discover how expensive the real world is. So let’s do some basic math about your expenses. These are the expenses a friend of mine who works at a smaller-sized metro daily pays a month This person has two years of experience. Anything in bold I added or edited:

I split a $900 rent payment with (significant other) every month, and that includes some utilities. We split $80 for cable/Interwebz. Car payment is like $260. Credit card is $200. Electricity is about $35-$40 (split two ways, so $18-$20).  Then there’s groceries (about $100-$150 a month), split two ways. And maybe $100 on gas. And cell phone is $65, car insurance is $80. And I make $900-$930 every two weeks (after taxes and other deductions). Woo.

So, that’s about $1,300ish in monthly expenses on top of $1800ish or so a month. Remember, this doesn’t include other life expenses, such as getting dinner on occasion, going to the bar (as many journalists are want to do) or fixing your car’s transmission if it fails. Or doing anything fun that costs money. Obviously this would make it hard to save up to put a down payment on a new car or house. As my friend says: “Basically, I’m kind of poor, but I’m pretty pleased…theoretically I should be able to save at least $3,000 a year. Not happening.”

Compare that to another friend who does web development in a much more expensive metro area at a much larger news organization. This friend says: “I make between 70-80gs, with 2 years experience. Reporters with the same experience (at my office), make around 50-55.”

Again, this friend lives in a much more expensive city than the previous friend, with the cost of living being about 41 percent higher. But the second friend also chose to take a less traditional path, one that has fewer people with these skills. And as that list of 19 job openings that have yet to be filled indicates, it’s hard to fill these positions. Why? Because not many have the skills to fill them.

So, in summary, journalism folks: It is in your economic interests to learn how to make the internets. Sure, being in one of the traditional roles is pretty neat. Those traditional roles are what fund about 85-90 percent of the profits of most daily newspapers, so they’re what generally fund the salaries of the webby folk.

Journalism is a business, first and foremost. Sure, it’s also a calling. But if we can’t pay for the dedicated women and men who do this important work, then the important work won’t get done. So we’re trying to come up with new revenue streams online so we can start to make enough money to pay for everyone. Even though your career may not go where you originally intended, your work on the news organization’s web site may help fund journalism. Isn’t that important?

I think it is. So take the plunge. Come up with a web project and build it. Go through my Django tutorials. Just do something. You won’t regret it.