How important is it for journalists to know HTML/CSS? How about for journalism students, who will be entering a job market with more digital and fewer traditional job choices? This point has been discussed and debated to death. We’ve talked about it and covered sites and organizations that aim to help teach journalists to program.

But reading a recent post by University of Florida professor Mindy McAdams, it occurred to me how these skills have increasingly become expectations for job-hunting journalists. It’s not been enough for a long time to be a writer or a photographer, you need to be very good at something and at least good enough at others to be competitive in a world where writer’s send standups back from crime scenes and photographers produce slideshows, with intros and captions on the fly. But HTML? CSS? Javascript?

Her post is primarily aimed at journalism educators and why they should learn and teach HTML and CSS so their students are better equipped. But it’s beneficial to all journalists. She writes:

The system we use to present information on Web pages begins with HTML, a markup language that structures the content of the page.

I’m starting with HTML because I know a heck of a lot of journalism educators have never tried to learn HTML, and that’s just wrong. You know how to use a comma? Good, I would expect that. The basic use of HTML is just as important as correct use of commas, and it’s certainly not harder to learn.

The web is littered with comma splices, so certainly not everyone learned that skill. Nor will everyone be willing to learn HTML and CSS. (I say willing because I agree with Mindy that’s they’re very learnable. I taught myself starting when I was 10.) But she’s right, if a journalist wants to be competitive, to place themselves in the best position to land and keep a job, to have the best and most opportunities open to them, they’re going to want to know the basics or be willing to learn.
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It’s back-to-school season, and because Mediabistro’s core is education, the site has a timely contest this week that just involves telling the Twittersphere about a favorite teacher. Why’s that worthy of a post here? Well, teachers rock, but so does the contest– one tweet and you get $50 credit towards a course class useful for your digital storytelling.

So you win. Automatically. And can learn more stuff.

Also, if your tweet is the best, you get an entirely free course. In-person or online.

Anyone with a Twitter account who participates with a 140 character or less story about a teacher gets a $50 credit toward any Mediabistro course (they’ll DM you the promo code, which means you need to follow @Mediabistro, too). The top five best tweets get $100 credit toward any Mediabistro course. And again, the winner gets a free Mediabistro course. Read more

Journalists, what are some of your New Year’s resolutions? If one of them happens to be “learn to code”, then search engine titan Google has you covered with Google Code University.

There are many reasons that journalists should learn how to code. Like we’ve stated before here on 10,000 Words, coding skills are an essential part of working in a new media environment. A knowledge of HTML, CSS and JavaScript gives you the tools you need to create your own website, and can make you a valuable resource for any news organization. Not only that, several journalism fellowships and trainee programs are looking for journalists with programming knowledge. You can have the skills to apply for an opportunity to receive funding for your own cutting edge journalism projects.

Google Code University (GCU) does not require any registration, and materials are free to use. In Web Programming, for example, there are lectures, videos, and contributed course content to teach users how to create interactive web applications that go beyond your basic static web page.

Here are just a few of the courses GCU offers:

• Python
• C++
• Java
• CSS, HTML and JavaScript
• HTML5
• Web Security
• Algorithms
• Android Application Development
• Introduction to Databases and MySQL

Computer science educators are also welcome to submit their own coursework for inclusion within GCU. All courses will be placed under a Creative Commons license which will allow for people to reuse and modify the courses for their own curriculum as necessary. And if you’re looking for more curriculum to peruse or get stuck on a particular term, GCU also includes a search feature via Google Directory that includes lectures, assignments, papers and videos from schools like Harvard University, Duke University, and Carnegie Mellon University.

GCU is a part of Google Code’s education resources, which also include Google DocType and the popular HTML5 Rocks website. To get started today, visit http://code.google.com/edu.

There’s a joke in reporting that one person’s an anecdote and three’s a trend. It’s not really funny, though, because too many stories rely on this metric to prove something’s happening or happened. There’s a better way, it just takes some digging, maybe a FOIA request, and some minimum database skills (which is another topic, but if you’re really serious look into IRE’s training or if you’re still in school, take a computer-assisted reporting course, which your school ought to require).

By analyzing databases on topics on your beat you can find the real trends and back it up with statistics. Your job as a journalist is to make those numbers and statistics meaningful. (But don’t force the story, sometimes the data doesn’t support your hypothesis. It hurts, but it happens.)

Here are a few places you can find data that will help you support your stories with facts instead of trends.

Data.gov —This site will probably just overwhelm you with the sheer quantity of information. The hard part will be picking through what’s there for what’s relevant. But you can find some interesting federal government data, including everything from military marriage trends to consumer spending to climate change, if you dig. You can sort by the type of data, the department that collected it, the category, location, topic, and more. At least try a few searches to see what’s what — and whether it leads to or fits in any of your stories.

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Next month, I graduate from American University. I will also start my first job, as an online editor at National Journal. I feel incredibly lucky to have such an opportunity, since journalism jobs are not overly abundant.

So, how did I do it? It’s a mixture of drive, enthusiasm and luck. Here are some of my tips for students in college or graduate school also looking to start off their careers in journalism.

1. Intern, Intern, Intern

Experience counts in the journalism field. Anyone serious about starting in journalism should have at least one internship on their résumé — and preferably more. The hands-on experience you get an internship is invaluable and difficult to replicate in a classroom setting. The people you meet at your internships is a gift that keeps giving: they’re professional references for those job applications. I landed my job out of my current internship at National Journal, where I focus on social media. For a potential employer, supervising an intern is a much better indicator of future job performance than reading their résumé or calling references.
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