While there are plenty of reasons to why journalists should gain some coding skills – it makes you a stronger digital journalist, you can fix things that break on your site, you can create projects without always going to the time-deprived developers, and so on – many journalists don’t see a real need to get their hands dirty in some code.

Well this week, the Knight-Mozilla OpenNews project team has provided journalists everywhere with a lot of motivation to start coding with the launch of its journalism code sharing site, Source.

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Newsrooms can be stressful places, full of strong personalities, short deadlines and an insatiable news hole. For reporters and editors, they’re stressful for another reason: The on-going uncertainty of when the fun may end and their ride on the journalism merry-go-round will stop while they join the queue of former journalists vying for fewer and fewer news jobs.

Meanwhile, software developers can often have their pick of locations and a plethora of job opportunities to go after. Their skills are in demand in many industries. So why should they bother to take their talents to a corner of the development industry where so often the “developing story” is about its own struggles or layoffs?

Besides the obvious — we need help to make cool news apps to compliment and help build on our stories! — Dan Sinker at PBS MediaShift Idea Lab tracked down six developers working in the news business to get their take on why they wanted to code in the newsroom.

It turns out they’re drawn for similar reasons as the writers and editors: the unpredictable, deadline-driven development atmosphere is fun, and there’s the opportunity to help tell the story and make news and data more meaningful.

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.