Persaud is a self-taught coder and journalist who worked for Bankrate.com, launched a subscription data site, RichBlocksPoorBlocks.com, and worked as an intern and a data interactive reporter at his hometown newspaper, the Palm Beach Post. He is now a freelance writer and programmer.

DL: Lindsey Cook, who referred you to me, says that she wouldn’t start a journalism school.

Persaud: She’s not the only one who would tell you that. I’m sure you don’t need it.

DL: Why not?

Persaud: You’ve done this far longer than I have. If someone says they have a degree, are you impressed, or are you more impressed when someone says I’ve been reporting for x amount of years?

DL: That’s true. Journalism is a practice. When you talk about journalism, what does that mean? What does that mean to do journalism?

Persaud: At its most basic, it means getting information to people. That’s what it is. Getting information to people. A website, newspaper or radio or TV; something that goes from you to a bunch of people at the same time.

DL: As a journalist, what do you need to know? What skill sets do you have to have?

Persaud: As a reporter, you need to know the basics of how to find information. That could mean going through spreadsheets, or going to someone and getting the information from them. You need to know how to get the information. If you don’t know where to go, you would ask someone who has a better idea. I don’t know much about the court system, so I would ask the court reporter and they would point me in the right direction. You have to know how to talk to certain people, what expressions to look for, what statutes you need to know and what forms to fill out. The most basic level is how to find the information.

DL: Has that changed because of things like big data and the Web? There’s a lot of different ways to find information now that weren’t available then. Does that change anything?

Persaud: It doesn’t change knowing how to get the information. It changes now that there are so many more ways to get the information you want, you need to know all those different ways in addition to what I’ve talked about. I guess back then, they taught you how to do the regular stuff, like how to talk to people, so today you could add in how to find specific information. Say you are working in city reporting and you need the budgets. In the past you would have to go through someone to get the copy of the budget. Is that right?

DL: Right.

Persaud: And nowadays, it’s on the Web. Even for the little towns. I go on their website, flip through it and determine what departments could be cut. Technology has made getting the information very easy, where in the past there was a roadblock to that.

DL: Is there a skill set that you need, like coding? In terms of your own skill set, do you need to know them?

Persaud: Ideally everyone would know a little bit, enough to get data and spreadsheets and crunch them. When we get to work in the morning, we have to go immediately to the beat or call up the city commissioners, going to the scene, etc. Some people have to have help to show them what kind of data they need. People like us that are actually data reporters should know how to code and stuff to be able to go through databases and combine them as needed. Let’s say someone who is a courts reporter should know a little bit to do the stuff they need, like going through a big spreadsheet of court records. I don’t think they need to know Ruby or Python. I guess the answer to your question is that first of all, reporters should be reporters. Everyone should know the basics of coding.

DL: How did you decide to go into journalism?

Persaud: I was on the school paper in Boca Raton. I did that, writing and reporting there. I thought it was fun.

DL: Did you study computer science?

Persaud: I didn’t do that, either. I didn’t do coding until after I graduated. I started learning coding after I started my first real job. I studied urban planning.

DL: So you agree that you wouldn’t start a journalism school?

Persaud: I would take the money and start a school paper or a local paper and call it a school, because they’re learning.

DL: What are you doing now?

Persaud: Right out of college, I was at Bankrate.com. [He then took an internship at the Palm Beach Post.]

DL: How did you decide to go from one to the other?

Persaud: I quit Bankrate and then was doing freelance work and also running a website. A person I knew from the Post offered me this internship, and I took it.

DL: Do you like it? Is it local news?

Persaud: It’s a local newspaper.

DL: What was the website you ran?

Persaud: It is called RichBlocksPoorBlocks.com. It posts income and rent data and other kinds of data for neighborhoods in the U.S. When the person from the Post offered me the internship, I thought it sounded really fun. I also do data things there, too, with a couple of other data folks.

DL: So in a reasonably short time, you’ve done three really different things: You’ve worked at a commercial site, you’ve been entrepreneurial and started your own pay site, and now you’re working as a daily reporter. Can you learn how to do all of that at a school newspaper?

Persaud: I think if the paper is run right and has a good grownup watching over it, without being too controlling, to make sure they don’t screw it up too badly. Or if they do, help them learn from what they did.

DL: Many faculty teaching in journalism schools today don’t have your skill sets.

Persaud: I think you can do fine teaching yourself if you have the time and you know where to go and where to look. I just Googled around “coding for journalists.”

DL: And just taught yourself.

Persaud: I don’t think you can say that. I found a good tutorial, and I learned from that.

DL: But you didn’t learn it all by yourself. The tutorial taught you, but you weren’t in a classroom.

Persaud: Right. I found one by Dan Nguyen, the “Bastards Book of Ruby.”

DL: So you just sat down and learned it. Should all journalists be doing that?

Persaud: I guess if they knew a bit of coding, that would help. Old reporters have institutional knowledge and a lot of connections, so I think the need for them to learn coding is not as great, especially if they have new reporters who know it and can help them a little bit. Right now, us young reporters have time, so why not learn a little bit of coding? If you know the basics of Excel spreadsheets and how to do some equations to find the whatever, an average crime rate, for example, that would be good. It also helps with the budgets and tax rates and spend rates. If you can find that out, it’s a new story. In my case, we have a couple of poor towns that have one of the highest tax rates in the county, but the average home is worth very little, so effectively you don’t get much tax. Those kinds of facts you can get from basic spreadsheet skills.

DL: That’s like computer-assisted reporting. You are at a reasonably small city newspaper. In 15 or 20 years, do you think journalism will be the same there or anywhere as it is now?

Persaud: No. It will be different in five years.

DL: Any ideas about how?

Persaud: I guess that the main change will be in the business model. For a long time, the newspapers and magazines got most of their money not from us readers, but from the advertisers. The reason they started going downhill was not because of the Internet, but because it was cheaper to advertise on Google than the newspaper, and Craigslist was free, and both reached the same number of people, as well as different types of people. The advertisers stopped spending money on newspapers and started spending on Google. The biggest part of the change is the price of the newspapers for the readers. The newspapers will be more expensive for the readers. If the papers do it right, they will have information worth paying for.

DL: You think people will start paying for newspapers’ online content?

Persaud: Yes, but for local news specifically. Pretend you are a news service. If you want to cover world news, you don’t need to reach all 7 billion people, just a small percentage of it to make enough money to stay afloat. You can afford to charge like $10 a month and reach a couple of million, a tiny percentage of the entire population. You want to cover only the local news, like your county. Your county is maybe a million people. You will need 15-20 percent of the people to subscribe. You will need to charge more to get a good staff to cover the news.

DL: What makes you think people will pay for it? Would you pay for it?

Persaud: Depending on the information that is on there, they could be willing. I have one example that works. My website charges $50 for a year’s access to the data it provides. One way would be for local news to make contributions to state or local politicians, or to budgets. Let’s say that online, they have interactives on the city, state and county budget, and they make a game out of it. Let the people fiddle around with it and see how it comes out and then share it online to compare with others.

DL: How long did it take you to build your website?

Persaud: I had to learn PHP [hypertext preprocessor, a scripting language for Web development] for that. I learned how to build websites in late 2012. After that I learned how to do the mapping part of that, and that took maybe a couple of weeks. Then I learned PHP in a month or two. It took three to four months to get the basics down.

DL: How do you let people know it’s here?

Persaud: I started by posting on realty boards. Eventually a couple of bigger sites picked it up, so more people started coming in.

DL: It’s a pay wall.

Persaud: It should let you see some data for free before you have to pay.

DL: It stays current by itself?

Persaud: Yes. It’s from census data.

DL: Is being able to do this a requirement of being a journalist?

Persaud: No. I don’t think so.

DL: So this was just a project?

Persaud: Right.

DL: And it’s your project, not associated with your news organization?

Persaud: Correct.

DL: Where do you go for news?

Persaud: Twitter posts or FiveThirtyEight.com, Nate Silver’s website. And Google News sometimes to see their news of the day about national and international news. When you are talking about those sources, you are talking about sources trying to reach the whole country and maybe internationally as well. I think they will still be around because they are linked to or covering the federal government. Some of them get interesting enough news from the government that readers will want to pay for it or advertisers will pay for them.

DL: You are the ideal reader for the [New York Times] Times and the [Washington] Post. You are educated and a journalist. You are very news savvy and interested. When I asked you where you go for news, you didn’t say the Post or the Times. You said these other sites. If you don’t go there, who goes there?

Persaud: I probably go to the Post and the Times last. I go to everybody else. They are trying to reach everybody in the country, and they have to go against BuzzFeed, Gawker, FiveThirtyEight and the others covering the same kind of stuff. That means that The Times and The Post may not cover that stuff as much as they used to. I don’t know enough to speculate on that.

DL: What’s your dream job? If you could work anywhere, where would you work?

Persaud: I would work at the local paper, whether it’s the Palm Beach Post or somewhere else.

DL: So you always wanted to be in community or local news?

Persaud: I think so.

DL: It’s always been [that] the pinnacle of the journalistic profession is working at The New York Times. That’s not true for you?

Persaud: It’s a nice place to visit, but I don’t know why I would leave the beaches of Florida to move to New York.

DL: You could cover Florida for The New York Times.

Persaud: I don’t see the point of it when we have a great newspaper right here. I think if The New York Times tried to compete with us, they’d lose.

DL: Your professional choices are grounded in geography rather than your employer.

Persaud: Yeah. I grew up here, so I know it.

DL: Oh, so you are home.

Persaud: Yes.

DL: One last question. You didn’t go to J-school. You learned journalism on your own.

Persaud: I wouldn’t say on my own. It’s more like outside of a J-school. I was lucky that I knew enough people to know where I needed to go with the skills I have. I was fortunate enough to find those things.

DL: When I say on your own, I don’t mean that you did this without external advice. But you went out and found it, and then learned it yourself. Your advice to a journalism wannabe is to start a newsroom or newspaper. You would put a journalism wannabe in an environment where she was doing it instead of in a classroom learning about it.

Persaud: Yes.

DL: Eric Newton talks about a teaching hospital where students spend all their time with professionals. Is that what you mean?

Persaud: I guess so.