J298 Programming for Journalists

The first class is on Friday Sept. 28

This course is an introduction into programming concepts as it relates to the journalism industry. The goal of this course is to equip students with foundational technical knowledge to construct a wide variety of digital interactive web elements including—but certainly not limited to—interactive timelines, news quizzes and games, data visualizations and charts, interactive multimedia videos or audio slideshows, and digital news packages.
Students will learn the basics of JavaScript—the language of the web. They will learn the fundamentals of Object Oriented Programming (OOP), which is at the core of virtually every modern programming language. The course will cover variables, typecasting, arrays, for-loops, conditional statements, comparison operators, functions, and cross-domain data requesting. This course will also cover popular data formats like XML and JSON, and how to use APIs.
The applications to journalistic storytelling are endless; some examples include retrieving data from popular services like Twitter or the New York Times API and developing maps, or visualizations to help people better understand public sentiment. Other examples include constructing interactive narrative elements, like videos or choose-your-own-adventure games (i.e the popular interactive Spent game http://PlaySpent.org )
Students completing this course and gaining proficiency in the concepts will be well equipped for a multitude (and growing) number of web producer jobs that have inundated the journalism job market.

Restrictions and Prerequisites:
Students must have completed the Digital News Package class, or the Web Development class in the fall. Students who have not taken either of these courses should contact the instructor for exceptions. Basic knowledge of jQuery is highly encouraged.

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