Columbia University will soon offer a combined engineering and journalism degree. It's a unique program the Ivy League institution hopes will produce cross-disciplinary ninjas prepared to develop the newsrooms of the future. The new Master of Science Program in Computer Science and Journalism is the first of its kind, according to Shree Nayar, who chairs the computer science department at Columbia's Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science, which offers the program with the Columbia School of Journalism. The university shared the details with Wired.com in advance of the announcement later Wednesday.
Journalism schools have frantically updated their programs in the last decade or so, as it became increasingly clear that traditional, newspaper-oriented skills were no longer enough to prepare students for the real world. But even fluency in broadly defined "multimedia skills" isn't enough, with coding becoming as crucial to the news business as knowing how to use a computer was a couple of generations ago.
The Columbia program, which will accept its first 15 students (tops) in the Fall of 2011, seeks to attack the barrier between journalists and the increasingly important IT professionals whose web and digital savvy are crucial to any form of news gathering, reporting and delivery. The problem: Users really don't know what to ask developers for (or how), and developers have no real idea what their software will need to do in the hands of the users.
"The IT Department [at a news organization] comes up with software programs that the journalists don't use; the journalists ask for software that is computationally unrealistic," said Julia Hirschberg, professor of computer science at the Columbia's Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science. "We aim to produce a new generation of journalists who will understand both fields."
Bill Grueskin, academic dean of the Columbia School of Journalism, told us that although students generally know their way around the web by virtue of being young, creating these powerful new tools requires a different, deeper skill set -- one that, to date, has been missing from university journalism and technology departments, and it's underrepresented in the field at large to a damaging extent.
"Some people coming out of high school or college possess technical savvy, but more often than not, the skill set is bordered by an ability to use Wikipedia, Facebook and Gmail," said Grueskin, noting that while Columbia journalism students are taught to edit multimedia and maintain websites, "almost all of those skills rely on using existing software or programs to do digital journalism. We hope and expect that graduates of this program will be more able to innovate and create the solutions the news business so sorely needs."
The concept makes sense, the problem it addresses is real, and Columbia is capable of taking on the challenge. But we were most fascinated by the technologies these professors hope their graduates will contribute. Here they are, in alphabetical order:
Automated journalism modules
Rather than replacing what journalists do, technology can take care of routine tasks, freeing up more time for interviews, analysis, writing and editing. Journalists don't recognize these opportunities often enough.
"A well-trained computer scientist learns to generalize from a particular problem to a class of problem, recognizing patterns that are not obvious to a computational lay person," said Henning Schulzrinne, professor of mathematical methods and computer science at Columbia's Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science. "Rather than, say, running a spreadsheet each time ... [they] can construct a more general-purpose tool that's more robust and requires less manual intervention [and] build modular tools that can be combined in various ways."
Data Visualization
Television anchors play with all sorts of data visualizers on today's news shows, but Grueskin points out that opportunity clearly exists for improving the way images, charts and the like present complex information quickly to users. It's a good point, especially now that the screens we read the news on are increasingly attached to large screens and fast processors.
Deep data mining and analysis
Technology already helps journalists crunch data to identify trends, but it often has a hard time accessing valuable information buried in databases. Columbia estimates 90 percent of the internet's information is invisible to today's search engines and must be found by a series of individual queries. The program will encourage students and faculty to "synthesize this raw data into relevant content for news organizations to present in an accessible form for readers." Also, journalists could mine publicly available data, like the information on Twitter, more thoroughly, says Hirschberg, especially to identify political trends.
Device-driven journalism
Some progress has been made with mobile reporting, and mobile app stores are teeming with news apps, but delivering efficient, accurate P2P news to and from mobile devices could require an entirely new architecture.
Digital trust
The internet is rife with high-quality content, but its inclusiveness makes people question online information. Human-driven debunking sites such as Snopes.com help clean up misinformation after the fact, but how do readers know which articles are most accurate upfront? Sure, you can stick with a few publications and journalists, but technology can help readers explore unfamiliar terrain without fearing that it's booby-trapped, encouraging accurate articles to spread faster than inaccurate ones.
Identifying under-reported events
Software engineers with a journalistic bent could build tools that sniff out "officially unreported events like epidemics, natural and other disasters in nations with a tight rein on the news," according to Hirschberg.
Next-generation narrative
Text, audio, photos and videos each have their strengths for telling news stories, and none are going away, but they may not be the end of the line. Grueskin says tomorrow's technologist-journalists should be able to devise new storytelling media using 3-D photography and other methods.
This interdisciplinary masters program includes two semesters in the Columbia School of Journalism and three in Columbia's Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science, accepting its first round of applications this fall.
See Also:
- Open-Source Journalism: It's a Lot Tougher Than You Think
- Citizen Journalism Wants You!
- Dolly, Rejection and Radiohead Journalism
- Can Device Integration Save Music Journalism?
Photo courtesy of Flickr/Gustavo Faraon
