Last spring, Nick Bilton, an adjunct professor at New York University (and a New York Times blogger), and his technology class stashed sensors all over their floor at the Tisch School of the Arts: on elevators, in hallways, outside bathrooms, in the lounge and in classrooms. They let the sensors collect data for about 36 hours and then rounded them back up.
Bilton says the students discovered a lot about the work habits of their classmates: "People used the left elevator more than the right one, and people barely take the stairs. People show up around 9 pm and leave around 4 am. In the morning, there's not much activity."
Bilton admits that foot-traffic patterns in one of NYU's buildings are not "a big news story," but the story was important to a particular audience -- his students. The exercise was his way of demonstrating a belief that is central to the way he, a former programmer at The Times, conducts his journalism: reporters need to know how to manipulate computers in order to tell the stories that matter most to their audiences.
As a reporter, Bilton uses code to track hires at companies like Apple and Amazon. He has written programs to test Facebook's privacy policies. He says hacks should be hackers, and he isn't alone. In San Francisco, the Forbes reporter Taylor Buley, despite saying he is "not a great programmer," writes code scripts to help him "do the same work, just quicker."
And now, the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism is starting a dual-degree master's program in journalism and computer science. Many j-schools teach how to edit videos and write HTML, the Internet's simplest code. One goal of the Columbia program, according to Bill Grueskin, the dean of academic affairs, is to produce journalists who will "take it several steps beyond -- to where they're creating a lot of their own new tools." That means learning enough computer science and software engineering to be able to design tools for information gathering, synthesis, analysis and circulation -- or enough, at least, to see what technology can do for journalism. Henning Schulzrinne, a computer-science professor at Columbia, says he hopes students will also leave the program with "tools to assist in gathering, processing and presenting news."
But what's in it for the engineers, who might have more lucrative things to do than save journalism? Grueskin argues that "one of the things engineers want to do is find practical, intractable problems society is facing and help come up with ways to solve those problems." The unhealthy state of journalism, he says, is definitely one of those intractable problems.
Julia Hirschberg, a professor of computer science who has helped plan the new program, told me in an e-mail, "We don't expect everyone who graduates to work for traditional news companies." She said, however, that the skills students will walk away with will leave them "in a great position" to contribute to all kinds of companies -- and she mentioned technology firms like Yahoo and Google.