Medill program aims to create more 'Adrian Holovatys'

As part of the Knight News Challenge, the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University was given more than $600,000 to create an academic program blending computer science and journalism, designed to fill a staffing void at many digital news sites.

"We are offering full scholarships to Medill's master's program in journalism ... to people with computer programming skills," says associate professor Rich Gordon. "The goal is, in essence, to try to create more Adrian Holovatys."

"We want students who already have tech skills to come to Medill, learn the culture,
craft and mindset of journalists, and figure out interesting ways of connecting technology and journalism. As you know, there are many ways the industry and the academy have tried to teach tech skills to journalists -- the proposition here is that it would be interesting to see what happens if we teach journalism to tech types."

Applications for the new program are being accepted now, for admission as early as September 2007. Here is information for prospective applicants:
http://www.medill.northwestern.edu/admissions/programmers.html

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At Chicagocrime.org, people can investigate for themselves what kinds of crimes are most common in their neighborhoods. On the Web site for the Asbury Park Press in New Jersey, people can look up property assessments, campaign contributions and government workers who are “double-dipping” by holding down more than one taxpayer-financed job. At Digg.com, users help each other find relevant news by selecting and voting for the articles they find most interesting. At WashingtonPost.com, visitors can search through databases of congressional votes, campaign contributions and Bill Clinton’s speaking fees.

Each of these examples is a significant technological achievement. Each also represents a marriage of journalism and technology – database development, application programming, interface design and search algorithms applied toward the goal of a better informed society. In the digital age, journalism is more than just reporting and storytelling. And technology is more than just business systems or inventory management or e-commerce. For people to discover and act upon the information they need to be citizens in a democratic society, journalism and technology must increasingly intersect.

That’s why the Medill School of Journalism and the Knight Foundation are announcing a new scholarship program for technologists to obtain a master’s degree in journalism. Applicants with experience or academic degrees in computer programming or related fields have a chance to win full or partial scholarships, with a cash stipend, enabling them to attend Medill’s nationally recognized, one-year master’s program.

“The skills and insights that technology developers have are increasingly important to the analysis, delivery and accessibility of information needed in a democracy,” said Rich Gordon, who directs Medill’s program in new media journalism. “At the same time, the journalistic skills learned at a place like Medill can yield important ideas for applying technology in ways citizens will find relevant and engaging.”

Funding from the Knight Foundation, through its Knight News Challenge initiative, will enable Medill to offer the equivalent of nine full scholarships, plus cash stipends, to technologists who earn a MSJ at Medill over the next three years. At least one full scholarship will be offered in each of the next three years; the remaining scholarship money will be awarded as full or partial scholarships based on the applicant pool.

“Medill is grateful to the Knight Foundation for recognizing the need for people who understand both journalism and technology,” Gordon said. “The scholarships will enable us to graduate a group of students who will be uniquely qualified to help reinvent journalism and develop new ways of presenting and delivering information.”

Adrian Holovaty, editor of editorial innovations at Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive, is a living example of what someone with both journalism and programming skills can accomplish. A journalism graduate of the University of Missouri who taught himself to program, Holovaty helped develop the technology behind the innovative Web sites of the Lawrence Journal-World (Lawrence.com, ljworld.com and kusports.com) and later went on to create Chicagocrime.org as a personal project. He also is part of the team that developed the open-source Django framework, which allows Web developers to build database-driven sites quickly and efficiently. At Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive, he is responsible for a variety of database-driven applications, including congressional votes, campaign contributions and Bill Clinton’s speechmaking.

“I'm excited about this new scholarship program at Medill,” Holovaty said. “Programming is becoming a bona fide sub-discipline of journalism, at the same level as photography, infographics and writing, and this Knight grant helps legitimize that. It will also have the tangible benefit of producing skilled journalism technologists, people sorely needed by news Web sites. The graduates of this program are going to be in high demand.”

Applications for the new program are being accepted now, for admission as early as September 2007. Students who receive the scholarships will complete the same academic program as other MSJ students. The first academic quarter is spent learning reporting and storytelling skills in multiple media. At least one other quarter is spent in Medill’s Chicago newsroom, covering a beat and creating multimedia stories. As part of the program, all of the scholarship recipients will also be enrolled in an “innovation project” class such as the Media Management Project, New Media Publishing Project or Magazine Publishing Project. In these classes, teams of students create new products or work to solve a problem facing a media company. Scholarship recipients will have the opportunity to apply their technology skills to these projects. They also will be able to choose among a variety of elective courses.

May 23, 2007 | BY JONATHAN DUBE

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