DIGGING DEEPER
Web Focus Leads Newspapers to Hire Programmers for Editorial Staff — BY MARK GLASER, 12:15PM — Whenever journalist-programmer extraordinaire Adrian Holovaty speaks at a conference, newspaper executives approach him to ask, "Where can we find another person like you?"
Context & Ripple Effects
MediaShift's Mark Glaser documents a confirmed 2007 shift: newspapers are adding programmers directly to editorial staffs as their web ambitions deepen, rather than treating code as an IT-department function. The telling detail is the scramble around Adrian Holovaty himself — executives corner him at conferences asking where to find another person like him, which says less about one individual than about the absence of any established pipeline producing journalist-programmers.
First-order effects
- Editorial budgets now compete in the open labor market for software engineers, a pool with no journalism-school supply line — making people like Holovaty the scarcest hires in the building.
- Newsroom job definitions widen on the spot: 'editorial staff' no longer means only writers and editors, forcing HR and union classifications built around print roles to accommodate coding jobs.
Second-order effects
- Rival papers chasing the same tiny talent pool bid up compensation for hybrid skills, while journalism schools and training programs face pressure to produce graduates who can both report and build.
- Papers without the budget or patience to grow this talent in-house fall behind on database-driven and interactive storytelling, turning web capability into a competitive differentiator between titles.
Third-order effects
- If the hiring pattern holds, the newsroom's center of gravity shifts from packaging stories for one daily edition toward maintaining structured data and ongoing web products — a structural change in what a newspaper is and who its employers need.
- A new professional identity — the journalist-programmer — emerges as a recognized career path, which over time reshapes who enters the industry and what skills journalism education treats as core.
The trend: Newspapers are moving from print-centric staffing toward hybrid journalist-programmer newsrooms, with the web shifting editorial work from producing editions to building data-driven products.