Coding the News

I'm pleased to release my syllabus and course materials for "Coding the News," the class I'm leading this semester for the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY.

All of the skills we cover are scripted out with explanations, links, screenshots and code snippets. The lessons are free to anyone in the Coding the News course materials.

I'm teaching students how America's top news organizations escape rigid publishing systems to design beautiful data-driven stories on deadline. The goal is to cover the largely undocumented set of tools that newsrooms use to make template-busting longform stories, interactive games, annotated maps and live-updating data dashboards.

These story forms, forged in the experimental days of the web, are now well-established widgets ready for manufacture. I believe they deserve to be enshrined alongside the inverted pyramid and the anecdotal lead.

We'll walk through how to set up a proper coding environment with, yes, an AI assistant. We'll introduce static-site development with a component-based JavaScript framework. We'll learn how to flow data into the page and engage users with interactive inputs. We'll cover the principles of disciplined news design. Then we'll get plenty of practice.

Lesson 1 on how to install Visual Studio Code, GitHub and Microsoft Copilot is available now.

Lesson 2 on how to publish a static website with Node.js, SvelteKit and GitHub Pages is also available.

As the semester progresses, I'll release a new tutorial each Monday after we finish our session on the school's campus in Midtown Manhattan. Our classroom time will largely be spent on hands-on instruction, followed by laboratory time for practice and peer review.

Students will hear from a series of professional guests, including Joe Fox, Armand Emamdjomeh, Allison McCartney, Alvin Chang, Andrew Briz, Rhyannon Bartlett-Imadegawa and Tiana McGee.

The code that powers the class site is available as open-source software.