It would take years for most software engineers to write material up to the questionable standards of journalism, but you could have them writing functional articles in a weekend. You won't have most journalists writing functional code in a weekend, even if you don't hold them to the questionable standards of software development. Practically every field is deeper than a single human can delve in their lifetime, but that doesn't mean that every field has an equally high barrier of entry.
I'm not sure I have a grasp on what you believe journalism to be. Could a room full of software developers write a bunch of blog posts about random topics? Sure. But, as much as it may seem otherwise from the outside, that's not what a newsroom is doing. In fact, that's not even what the trade press does.
We also, as a profession, have a real problem with the rift between our enthusiasm for the work we do and its real world complexity. An enormous chunk of all software development work could be approximated or even substituted entirely with a reasonable set of Excel spreadsheets (spreadsheets, of course, being the world's most popular software development environment); many of us spend entire careers simply plumbing one set of database columns into another set of form fields and tables. Could I teach a bunch of journalists to model a bunch of business processes in Google Sheets? Yes, I think I could.
If you think that's a laughable comparison, I'd ask you to consider whether your conception of the work of a journalist isn't akin to my hypothetical conception of the work of a software developer.
And to add on to your point, what makes a news organization successful is not just good writing, but good journalism, which comes from journalistic and beat experience – i.e. you couldn't produce a successful news org by hiring English PhDs.
The original commenter's thought process is as absurd as a layperson bragging they could just as easily produce a functioning website with production-ready code because they've learned how to write the <link> and <script> tags needed to include Bootstrap and jQuery. It's not the code itself that makes a tech company. Just as it is not just words strung together in paragraph form that makes a news org.
I'd argue that you can have a successful news organization through producing lots of profitable content that has poor journalism and poor writing, but is sufficiently aggressively optimized clickbait - and that's the cause of the current degradation of news quality; good news and good writing have become neither sufficient nor absolutely necessary for success in news (or "news") industry.
And that's even not that new, already a hundred years ago there were highly successful news organizations that thrived not despite but because of bad journalism, exploiting misleading sensationalism to its full potential.
This has already been attempted for nearly a decade, by traditional journalists and outsiders (e.g. Demand Media), and the number of successful/sustainable/functional such companies is as infrequent as any tech unicorn, so the empirical evidence does not support your argument.
> And that's even not that new, already a hundred years ago there were highly successful news organizations that thrived not despite but because of bad journalism, exploiting misleading sensationalism to its full potential.
No argument there. And the golden era of American journalism – e.g. the 1970s to 1990s – produced great journalism and printed money for its owners (30%+ profit margins were not unheard of), but it's because established outlets had a virtual monopoly in their regions, especially newspapers (because TV/radio killed the need for evening newspapers, and in smaller cities, multiple newspapers).
But it has never been easy to create a successful/functional news org by just doing journalism. Just as it has never been easy to build a useful tech startup by creating production ready code.
Thank you. I write and edit professionally and am constantly amazed by how often people overestimate their own writing abilities, especially if they are very skilled in other fields. There is a difference between "using words" and "writing". The thought process usually goes: we all do the former every day, so how hard can the latter be? (Also, there are non-writing skills that are hugely important in journalism.)
The original post about journalists vs. SWEs is a comment on the content-mill, lowest common denominator nature of huge swathes of the current online publishing landscape, not about the difficulty(??) of Journalism vs. Coding or whatever.
Aren't we passed the point where good journalism drives a successful news org? The mainstream media is controlled by a few large companies. They buy up chains and hire like minded writers. Journalism has become a cog in a bigger machine.
I have worked with old-school journalists, and have done my share of freelancing between ~1993 and 2005.
Even reasonably well done journalism is like debugging complex technical problems, but instead of working with systems that behave in a well-defined manner, you are dealing with people and complex wetware systems. They do not behave well at all.
Journalist hunting for confirmation or corroboration of a good lead is like a software engineer doing root-cause analysis in a byzantine maze, where reliability of information is suspect and all interactions with various interfaces must be assumed adversarial. Or at best to provide wildly incomplete data.
And the final output, the article that eventually gets published? Ask yourselves: have you ever written postmortems that must make sense to an audience who do not have the technical background to understand the nuances of the problem domain? Audience who will actively try to misunderstand what you have written, and extract soundbites out of context? Could you include enough information in the postmortem to pre-emptively defuse such attempts, so that you could trivially quote a section to point out the strawman attempt?
That's what proper journalism is like. And I consider myself privileged to have worked with people that; they taught me skills I could not have picked up in the university or most workplaces.
> Could a room full of software developers write a bunch of blog posts about random topics? Sure. But, as much as it may seem otherwise from the outside, that's not what a newsroom is doing. In fact, that's not even what the trade press does.
This is an accurate description of most of the news I see. For every piece of news that's actual original journalism, there's 2 articles that essentially amount to summarizing C-Span and another 2 that are essentially blog posts. And then there's the editorial section that really is essentially a collection of blog posts.
