CUNY critique

On Monday night, ten students gathered at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY in Midtown Manhattan to present their projects to a jury of professional editors for the final edition "Coding the News."

It marked the conclusion of their 15-week quest to learn how newsroom developers escape rigid publishing systems to design beautiful data-driven stories on deadline. I was the instructor.

The goal was to canvass 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 in journalism textbooks alongside the inverted pyramid and the anecdotal lead.

Students learned how to set up a proper coding environment with, yes, an AI assistant. We covered static-site development with a component-based JavaScript framework, and how to flow data into the page and engage users with interactive inputs. They got plenty of practice.

Along the way, they heard from a cast of working professionals, who shared how data and design happen in America's leading newsrooms.

For their final assignment, the students developed a publication-ready project showcasing what they learned. On Monday night, they presented their work and got a fulsome critique from our panel of experts.

Now that the course's first run is complete, all the lesson plans are fully scripted with explanations, links, screenshots, and code snippets.

They're free to everyone at palewi.re/docs/coding-the-news/.

I hope that they can help someone else out there learn the skills I see as essential to today's work, even if they arrive secondhand via the AI agents that seem to gobble everything up these days.

Thank you to my students for joining me in an experimental class that we developed together, week by week. They are Niya Doyle, Sophie Hayssen, Nancy Jiang, Irene Adeline Milanez, Ashley Mowreader, Emma Ferrara, Chloe Shōko Rogers, Sidney Slon, Jack Walker and Chrissy Wang. Better follow them now, before they storm the newsroom and end up as your boss.

Our time together was immeasurably enriched by the gifted pros who invested their time in the next generation of talent. Thank you again to Sarah Almukhtar, Rhyannon Bartlett-Imadegawa, Andrew Briz, Alvin Chang, Armand Emamdjomeh, Joe Fox, Rich Harris, Sam Jacoby, Delfina Marchese, Allison McCartney, Tiana McGee, Casey Miller and Julia Wolfe.