How to teach a journalist programming

I’m generalising wildly, of course, but journalists – particularly student journalists – often try to learn programming from books. That may sound like common sense, but it’s not in an art or a science – and programming is both.

Programmers – if I’m to generalise wildly again – typically combine books (which they don’t read cover to cover) with documentation, adapting other code, trial and error, and each other. When they teach journalists, they often don’t realise that journalists don’t always share that culture.

And journalists – coming traditionally from a background in the humanities – are used to learning from books: static knowledge. Teaching programming to journalists then, I realised, would also mean teaching how programmers learn. —Online Journalism Blog.