Journalists of the future beware!

This weekend Mercedes Bunz argues in the Guardian that “now, if you want to become a journalist, you need to be able to code.”

And while hard-bitten old-school hacks will be perspiring into their typewriters, stubbing out another cigarette into their overflowing ashtrays and swigging from the bottle of whisky hidden under their desks at such a thought, there shouldn’t be too much cause for alarm. Bunz is probably wrong.

Her argument is that in a digital world there are so many more platforms to convey information – maps, mobile applications, augmented reality – that journalists will need to know how to get information on to them. And that means coding.

On the one hand, I can see what she’s getting at. It certainly helps a journalist in the digital age to have a few strings to their bow. Here at Zone all our writers know their way round content management systems and can negotiate html without breaking out in a cold sweat. But coding? Well, we have other people to do that. They’re on the tech team, where they’re supposed to be, playing World Of Warcraft in their lunch hour.

The point is, new digital platforms are just that – platforms. It makes as much sense to say that modern journalists need to know how to code as it would have done to say that Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein needed to know how to work a printing press to break the Watergate scandal; that David Frost needed to be able to cut and edit the footage of his interviews with Richard Nixon himself; or that Julie Burchill needs to be able to lay out pages in InDesign to get a feature published in a magazine.

Good journalism is good journalism and, as always, it will rely on other skilled people to get the message out there, whatever the platform.