Developing in the newsroom has always been my jam. Even when I’m not directly developing — like now, at Vox Media where I’m a product manager — my core responsibility is facilitating and helping define the development that happens in the support of the newsroom. Here’s why you should do it too, and especially as part of Knight-Mozilla’s 2015 Fellowship. The short answer for why you should develop in a newsroom is because it’s fun, you will be working with insanely smart peers serving an insanely smart audience, there will be lots of whiskey and cursing, and election night pizza, all while building news and information solutions no one else ever has before. But if that’s not enough, let me break it down for you…
Build things that matter.
Every day, you get to build software that helps tell stories that matter. Stories that impact people’s lives. Stories that can uncover corruption or expose mass health dangers or just entertain and inform.
Be shippin’ it all the time.
The world is always changing. At a much more rapid pace than you’d have at your standard technology company, you get to be working at an extremely fast pace and shipping your work on the reg. This means your opportunity for experimenting and iterating on projects is also at a much quicker pace, and often being published to a receptive audience who will tell you almost immediately whether your work is awesome or whether it sucks.
Collaborate with subject matter experts.
The reports and editors with whom you’ll be working really know their shit. They have the sources, the years of knowledge and research for their beats, the trust from readers. You get to work with those experts to collaborate on awesome solutions daily.
Work on a diversity of different projects.
Whether you’re at a newspaper — which has everything from a sports department to entertainment databases to metro desk — or a place like Vox Media with its seven varied verticals or a place like ProPublica, which covers the spectrum from fracking to America’s racial divide, you will be always exposed to a wide range of subjects.
Always continue learning.
To my previous points about diverse projects and working with subject matter experts, this means that you get to always keep learning. In order to execute on products that work, you have to force yourself to learn about processes and history and key players for topics you previously knew nothing about. Working in a newsroom with journalists is like going back to school, but more fun (there’s often a lot more cursing and whiskey and no tests except whether you’ve met the user’s needs).
Always continue teaching.
But it’s a two-way street. In addition to learning what others have to offer, you get to always be teaching as well, whether that’s teaching an editor about which data is most relevant for which formats, or teaching an ambitious reporter about python. You’ll be continually surprised at how eager the newsroom is to absorb your knowledge. And the best feeling is then catching someone teach their peer what you’ve taught them.
Always be challenged.
This work isn’t easy. We’re often dealing with sensitive, high-visibility topics. Credibility and trust are on the line. One mistake in your scraper will send incorrect election results to the masses. Publishing the wrong information can hurt people’s lives and get your publication sued. The deadlines are often quick and the data is often dirty. But you get to challenge yourself in new ways, and always.
Serve communities who care, and who you care about.
Because you’ll be shipping your work all the time, you get to do that experimentation much more publicly than you would in any other industry, and directly interact and build relationships with that community you’re serving. These are often the same communities that we’re a part of, covering topics our families and friends care about. (Hi, Mom!)
Invent new solutions.
The information industry has come far in recent years in evolving how we do storytelling in a digital world, but there’s still so much more to do, so much more progress to make, so many more problems to solve. This is a world that has immense and ever-growing potential at building the kinds of information solutions that help people live richer, more informed lives. And you can be a part of that. You can shape that. You can lead that. We need more leaders in this space.
Change the world.
No matter what newsroom you’re working in or how big your audience is, you’re going to be work that ends up having a big impact on the industry as a whole. The number of people doing the kind of work we do is still relatively small, and we’re all doing our best to show our work and learn from each other. If you come over to a newsroom and do good work and share that work, you’re going to influence and inspire people in newsrooms all over the country and world, who in turn take those learnings back to inform their own communities. It’s a never-ending cycle of stealing each other’s work, making each other stronger, and using all that feedback to continue building bigger and better products.
If you’re at all intrigued by these ideas, scadoodle on over and apply for a Knight-Mozilla fellowship in one of the many esteemed newsrooms across the country. Become a 2015 Knight-Mozilla Fellow by applying today.
This week the news apps team launched a fun little user-generated content project: 
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