In the post, Educating the journo-programmer, Dave Winer communicates the powerful combination that results from mixing the talents of programmers and journalists. Not content to merely extoll the power of the combo, Dave goes on to explain the importance of the new paradigm and how to get there.
The essence of the journo-programmer distills into making news work in this, the age of the Internet. The old castle is crumbling. The press as we knew it is rapidly vanishing. Courses such as Intro to Online Journalism, taught by my friend Justin Beck at SFSU, are teaching a new model of reporting. Using digital tools and platforms, telling stories using different media, publishing and producing content, his students are blurring the lines between journalists and programmers.
Speaking to the status quo at most universities, Dave remarks..
In most university departments there is permanent paid staff that manage the websites for the students and faculty. It seems to me, if your goal is to boot a new class of programmers and journalists, this activity should be brought into the curriculum, and every student should participate in managing and developing his or her own publishing infrastructure. [Direct Link]
The course at SFSU doesn’t include instruction on managing and developing his or her own publishing infrastructure. Yet. I’ve exchanged a few Tweets with Justin and he’s interested in adding it to his curriculum at some point. For now, his students are tapping into WordPress as a publishing platform.
And that is exactly where Dave’s journo-programmer concept takes the leap. The leap whereby the journalist (or any layperson really), not content to publish content to a repository that is controlled by the priesthood (server host), lights a match, ignites the wick that leads to the stack of dynamite stacked below the rack upon which the host’s server rests, and explodes the priesthood.
That server, which is running WordPress, which we pay a host to run is the core of the concept. That server is a computer. It’s not our computer. We are paying a host to use his computer to host our WordPress site. We are so close yet still so far from truly owning our own publishing infrastructure.
I’ve been running WordPress sites for years and have dutifully paid my host to manage the server upon which my words are served up to my readers. I’m about to explode that relationship. I now have a means to manage and develop my own publishing infrastructure. Amazon calls it an Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). I call it a computer. Whatever it’s called, by learning how to configure my own cloud computer, I’m taking a step closer to independence. The priesthood would have us believe that only they can manage the servers that hold our content but I agree with Dave, that is simply not true. And I’ll prove it.
By following Dave’s instructions on how to setup an EC2, I now have my own PC in the cloud. Sure, Amazon is still at the top of the food chain in this scenario but the difference between paying someone to host my WordPress site on their server and me, running my own server, is huge.
Now, I still have a lot to learn. With these new powers comes a learning curve. I’m OK with that. After all, that is the point of Dave’s post. Let’s teach this stuff in the schools so that future generations get this kind of knowledge under their belt. It’s only going to get easier from here on out and I’m thrilled to be taking control of my own publishing infrastructure.