Telling Tales Together: creating good collaborations between journalism and computing students

Technology keeps offering journalists new tools and techniques for exploring fresh ways of finding, researching and telling stories. This provides journalism educators and students with an ever-changing range of challenges and opportunities. One possible response is for journalism students to learn to collaborate with students from other subject areas, such as Computer Science. Using the KnightLab, at Northwestern University, Chicago, as a case study. The Knight Lab is a world-leading community of journalism educators and students, designers and developers, who work together on experimental projects aimed at finding new ways of doing journalism. The article’s findings are based on an observation of a Knight Lab class, interviews with Knight Lab staff, and an online survey of its students. Among its findings are that such collaborations work best when embedded in courses as optional modules, scaled properly and employing a selective process. Journalism students benefit from some prior coding knowledge, while classes need the support of specialist staff to be effective. The evidence also suggests there are pedagogical and employability benefits for students from these collaborations as they mirror current best practice in many newsrooms