Cook is a data journalist at U.S. News & World Report.

DL: What’s your sense of journalism? How do you connect the things you’re doing and the technology you’re interested in with the way journalism works?

Cook: I guess my sense of journalism is that it is changing a lot, which is what I think anyone would say at this time. It’s what everyone always said when I was in school: “It’s a great time to enter into journalism because it’s always changing.” I would hope that the reality of journalism is that it never stops changing and never has stopped changing, so this time isn’t any different than the previous times. I think a lot of publications are changing a lot and there are a lot of publications aren’t changing as quickly as they should, and there are a lot of areas of journalism that haven’t changed as I would have expected them to. For example, user design still is not a huge issue for most news organizations even though news organizations did latch onto SEO [search engine optimization] pretty early on, they haven’t latched onto user design as much.

DL: Any idea why that is?

Cook: I think historically, the managers in journalism have been older and not as tech savvy, and it’s been hard to explain to them why to do certain things. SEO is something you can point to and say, “Our numbers are increasing because of what we are doing here.” User design is not the same thing. Making your site easier to use, more fun to use, more pleasurable to use for the audience member doesn’t necessarily translate to humongous increases in traffic.

DL: Coming out of school, you’re working at U.S. News & World Report. Why did you choose a legacy media company?

Cook: I really looked at every single possibility because that’s my personality. I applied to everywhere from U.S. News to ProPublica to Yelp to Netflix. I looked at anyone telling stories with data. News organizations aren’t the only ones that tell stories with data. I really decided that I would be sad if I left journalism. From there, I know how to code and I also know how to write, so I didn’t want to do one or the other. At most news organizations, even the really big organizations, you either code or you write. Most coders don’t think of themselves as reporters. I’ve been in newsrooms where I’ve been on news applications teams, and the people coding the apps say they don’t want to call anyone and don’t want to write. That’s not the case for everyone, but that’s how the system is built. So even though everyone says they want the unicorn journalist, they’ve killed the unicorn by not having a position for them to go into. It’s either you code or you write. For me, coming out of school with both of those skills and liking them both, it was a challenge. I had some jobs that were user-centered design, which is also one of my passions, and some jobs that were coding, and some that were writing. This was the only job that was flexible enough for me to do all three as much as I wanted, which is what drew me to this job.

DL: What you’re saying is that rare is the job that allows you to integrate writing and coding in a productive way on a regular basis.

Cook: Yes. I think it’s all talk from those people saying they’re looking for that. When I said this is what I want to do and this is what I am, people were telling me that they didn’t have anything for that. At most legacy news organizations, I had connections and I was able to bypass the system. At the ones without connections, there was no way for someone to enter in with these skills and get that kind of job. At some news organizations, I was put into a pipeline and told, “This is where you start out and take your lumps, and when you’re done, maybe you can do something more fun.” A person who can code and write and do whatever else is not going to do that. If they can’t find a job in journalism doing what they want, they’re going to go to tech because they can get paid more. I just crossed those organizations off my list. Those are the news organizations that come out and say at conferences that they want those skills, send us more coders. People say that’s what they want, but it’s not translating to the hiring level. There are students who have these skills, and I know a lot of them, and it can be a challenge to find a job that allows you to do both of these.

DL: So what do you do every day? Describe your day.

Cook: Really, whatever I want, which is great. I run the data blog at U.S. News. It’s called Data Mine. I can write blog posts for it. Yesterday I wrote the OkCupid data thing, but it was a little deeper dive than most organizations did because it looked at all the blog posts on the OkCupid blog rather than just that one. Or I write longer stories, like the one I’m working on now about why big data hasn’t gone into the medical and health-care industry as much as we would have expected 10 years ago. And, I also code. I do bigger-term projects that involve JavaScript and D3 and all kinds of news application things you would imagine, both on my own and with reporters. I also do smaller graphics in connection with other reporters for stories.

DL: In the structure of a news organization and the team-building things you need to do, do you just have access to multiple people and you seek out those you want to work with? Or is there a larger structure?

Cook: I’m actually in the news section. I’m sitting with reporters all around me. I’m on their emails, and I can hear what they are saying. I think of myself as a reporter, which it is not that way for most people doing data visualization at a news organization. They’ll be called a news application producer or a data visualization editor and kind of be in their own pod, but not directly connected to the reporters. They are not following the news cycle or have their own beat in the way a reporter would. I also concentrate on health and education, which gives me even more of a focus. It’s now very different. I have my own beat, which is data, and I write about that, and then I talk to other reporters. I think it’s very different than the setup of a news organization with a bigger data visualization staff. I think that’s why data visualization hasn’t evolved that much; the data staff is typically so closed off from beat reporting and from the reporters.

I think one of the other problems, and one of the reasons I think these people are not coming out of the woodwork … well, let me segue a minute. I started the ONA [Online News Association] chapter at University of Georgia, and one of the things we did at the ONA chapter was to teach people how to code. We taught basic data visualization and basic coding. I also TA’ed a data journalism class, and we taught them coding. They didn’t have any experience with data visualization, and they came out with that experience. At the same time, I know that most likely no one that I taught in either of those groups, even though it was about 50 people, will look for the kind of job I have. I think that the problem is really the whole mystical thing about data journalists. Hiring managers aren’t saying, “Do you have these skills so we can utilize them?” I think that even though reporters have those skills, they will be afraid to use them because they aren’t going to be as good as the NYT or The Washington Post. They do huge visualizations and obviously they’re beautiful, but not everyone has the organizational capacity to spend that many resources on a graphic, and a lot of times the user isn’t going to recognize that those resources were spent and won’t know the difference. I am definitely a proponent of medium-sized graphics, and I think a lot of the reason we aren’t seeing these skills come out of the woodwork is because the bar is set so high.

DL: So what you are saying is that “good enough” is good enough. People come out of school with good enough visual representation skills to be able to produce content that would have meaning to audiences, but they aren’t given that opportunity.

Cook: Yes. And news organizations aren’t demanding that or giving them the structure to do that. For example, I know how to code in D3, but that doesn’t mean that every graphic I do is D3, even though that is the trendy, impressive visualization library right now. At somewhere like the NYT, almost every line graph will be custom, maybe in D3, which is impressive. But, if I’m doing a story on X, Y, Z and going to work on it for a day or two, I’m going to put my data in Datawrapper. Maybe it’s not perfect, but it looks fine and conveys the information properly, and it is clear to read, and the user doesn’t know the difference. Or care. And that means that my time is freed up to do other, more meaningful things. I just think that the allocation of resources is very, very strange.

DL: What is the incentive, then, for students in master and undergrad programs to be developing those skill sets? If you don’t see them in job descriptions, you don’t see them in job ads, and they don’t help you get into jobs you wouldn’t otherwise get, what’s the point?

Cook: I want to make one other point before I answer that question. I also think that the job descriptions that people write for entry-level data visualization jobs are completely ridiculous, and that’s why they can’t get applicants.

DL: Completely ridiculous how?

Cook: If you look at some of these descriptions, they have more things listed on them than a Ph.D. in human-computer interaction would know. I think that the person writing the description probably thinks the applicant will know this and that, and maybe not that. It’s been shown that women won’t apply for things if they don’t have nearly 100 percent of the qualifications. Most journalism students are women now. Even without the gender gap, people don’t need to know all that. I think possibly the hiring managers don’t know what skills you need, so they list everything. The lists I saw were listing an insane amount that no one coming out of school could be expected to know. You don’t need it. If you’re in data visualization and you know some JavaScript and D3, you know some programming fundamentals and you know the fundamentals of data, you can learn the other things as you need them. The word “expert” is used a lot. I applied to one job, and they wanted you to know Flash for a data visualization job. Flash hasn’t been used in data visualization in almost a decade. They are making the barrier way too high. I think that’s the reason that a lot of people who know but didn’t study computer science are apprehensive about applying for these jobs.

DL: I looked at a lot of those job descriptions. A lot of them are the same. They are very comprehensive.

Cook: They even include PHP [hypertext preprocessor, a scripting language for Web development]. You don’t need PHP to code a data visualization. No one can know all the languages and frameworks when they first start out. And each organization has its own language and framework that it works in. It’s ridiculous, and I think that’s a lot of the problem.

DL: Is it because the people who are writing the job descriptions are looking for someone with the expertise, but not have a clear sense of how much is enough?

Cook: I think that is a lot of it. They are small teams. They ask someone what they think the new person needs, and then someone else, and then someone else, and pretty soon, you have a list of 20 things. I think the other problem is the people who are asking their IT department, and the IT department is saying a ton of stuff, and that is the wrong stuff. And the people writing the job descriptions are the editors who have been doing this for 20 years, and they think that listing all of that will get them the best-qualified person. But some person straight out of school will not apply to a job that requires 20 things even if they have the basics.

DL: That’s really an interesting perspective.

Cook: I would say I know a lot for someone coming out of school about this field and have a pretty long skill set for someone my age. Even when I was applying, I had to remind myself that it was ridiculous, and they didn’t know what they were talking about. If I didn’t know that, I would have never applied for some of the jobs that I got offers for. I think that’s a lot of the problem when people can’t find diverse hires, because data shows that diverse hires will not apply for these positions. Although some of the descriptions have a disclaimer along the lines of, you don’t need to know all of this, just some of it, many do not. Maybe they think it is obvious, but to someone just out of school, it isn’t.

When I inquired about job opportunities, a popular response was for someone to tell me I wouldn’t be happy at their organization. You would be shocked at how often I was told this. It may have been at 50 percent of places. It was that common. I would say all of my experiences and skills, and people would say, “Oh, you wouldn’t be happy here” or “You don’t want to work here” or “We aren’t ready to hire someone like you.” Another popular one was “Go work at [insert trendy news organization].” And then they would just dismiss me. This is at major news organizations. The same ones who say they would kill to hire someone with this skill set. Ninety percent of news organizations do not have the hiring or newsroom infrastructure to hire someone with this skill set right out of college, and they aren’t trying to develop it. People won’t come if the position doesn’t exist.

DL: I’ve been told that the best and brightest new graduates don’t want to work for major legacy news organizations. They want to go for the startups or a different kind of news organizations. They think legacy news organizations are no longer where they want to start to build a career.

Cook: I applied to both legacy and startup organizations, and when I had to make a job decision, I did hear that from some students. Why not do something new and exciting? I think students are as excited with entrepreneurial new things as they are with legacy things. It depends on the student. The best time to go into a startup is when you are young because you have nothing to lose. If it folds, then you can say “I learned a lot,” whereas if you are an established reporter and go to Vox or Vice or The Marshall Project and it folds, then people are going to question your judgment. They know it is going to look good in the future when they go to a legacy organization to have had that experience. I don’t think there’s a big downside to either, and I think whatever the student chooses is fine. I haven’t noticed a huge trend either way. There are plenty of students who don’t want to work at a startup because they don’t feel that those have the journalism bedrock that they would have at the legacy organization.

… I also don’t think people see a lot of worth in graduate degrees in journalism when they have an undergraduate degree. I considered going to Stanford and Columbia for their graduate programs, but I couldn’t see wasting those two years’ worth of income and life to get another journalism degree when I can get a similar job now that pays around the same.

DL: I’ve spoken to a cross-section of people at major news organization, and there is some unease that they are no longer viewed by journalism students as the pot at the end of the rainbow. They are wondering whether they are the dream job anymore.

Cook: They are definitely not the dream job anymore, which is a great thing. It used to be that every journalist wanted to work at The New York Times, but now people are going to these small startups. That means ideas are moving around in a way they didn’t before. It’s great for journalism and great for training journalists. We should be excited there is no end of the rainbow anymore. As a journalist, there’s no point when you are going to say: “I’m done, I’ve made it to The New York Times, and now I am going to retire because there is nowhere to go from here.” That doesn’t exist anymore, and that is exciting.

DL: So tell me, you get to start your own journalism school, what does it look like and what does it teach?

Cook: I would say first of all, I don’t know that I would start a journalism school. I think the whole concept of a journalism school being separate from the rest of the university is very antiquated and is terrible for us. If you are going to be a political reporter or a coder, for example, you shouldn’t be taking all of these ethics and law classes. I think I took three or four in my degree; I’m totally down with that but don’t think I needed all of them. At the same time, I had to drop my CS [computer science] major into a minor because of all the problems of trying to major in two separate schools. I would have had to take a whole list of prerequisites to go to another school. There are a lot of educational barriers that are preventing people from being better journalists. They can’t do political science and journalism to be a political reporter, or computer science and journalism, and journalism is about all the connections between the different fields so that doesn’t make sense. I would knock down the barriers across campus that keep students from accessing the faculty experts in the areas they’re interested in studying. I would never start a journalism school.

Collaboration is very important. I TA’ed and helped start a class where there was a CS professor in the room, so we were teaching it together. That kind of collaboration doesn’t really happen in most of the schools that are doing cutting-edge things, like Columbia or Northwestern. They are taking journalism and CS hybrids like me and putting them in the journalism school. If you are going to hire someone to teach your students computer science, you should hire a computer scientist. If you are going to hire someone to teach your students about politics, you should hire a Ph.D. in political science, an expert.

People aren’t doing it because they are asking what those people know about journalism and what will they teach our kids that they can use? They can teach them a lot. Knock down those barriers. Professor education is also a big thing. Adjuncts can make that better, to make sure that you get the newest skills coming into your institution all the time, and also outside learning opportunities and realizing that students don’t need to be taught everything in a classroom setting. I learned several programming languages on my own. … You learn a lot by teaching yourself, if you know where to start, and we don’t necessarily need to teach in a way that everyone is sitting in a classroom.

DL: Certainly that’s true, but that’s also about self-motivation. When you are talking about nontraditional ways of learning, you’re talking about internships?

Cook: Even though you say it’s about motivation, which it is, we don’t give the students the opportunity to learn in other ways. While there are a lot of students at the University of Georgia journalism program who wanted to learn about coding, it’s a difficult thing to start. They didn’t have someone to start the fire and say, “Do these three things first.” When we started the ONA chapter, we had study group where we went through Code Academy together with several CS majors to help explain the things we didn’t understand. All colleges could start that, and no one has. I don’t think we are giving students enough flexibility to learn the things they want to learn.

DL: What was the response to that when you set that up?

Cook: It varied, but I think there were probably 20 people who finished it.

DL: Are there going to be journalists in 2025? Is this a dilution of what journalism does? Will there be a traditional journalism school?

Cook: I think there is always going to be a need for journalists because we need to sort through information. I think eventually we will get to this myth of a unicorn journalist, a jack-of-all-trades journalist, who has all the tools and picks which ones to use in a story. The only news organizations doing that are the really small ones because they are forced to do that. Big organizations are not doing that at all, even though they say they want someone who can write and do video and audio and take pictures, leaving the coding out of that, there is no job that requires all of those. I think journalism schools will be closer to information schools, taking in and conveying information. For example, human computer interaction is a field I’m interested in and may eventually get my graduate degree in. It’s very similar to journalism in that you can tell stories with data, and it’s all about how people interact with technology; journalism is about how people interact with the world around them and conveying that. I think the journalism major will exist, but we need to rethink it.

DL: Some of the people I’ve spoken to are at Narrative Science in Chicago. They are taking data and turning it into narrative without human intervention. What do you think about that?

Cook: I think that if that is how the world was, it would be extremely boring. We can already do this to an extent. With earthquake stories, you can feed in data and have an algorithm write the story for you. That may be a good way to relay information, but journalism isn’t all about relaying information. Journalists have style, and machines do style really poorly and will probably [never] do it very well. Even though a machine may be able to tell you what the score was at the game was last night, they will never write a sentence like someone from NY Mag can. It’s the same reason machines will never write a book. While machines can crawl the Internet and then print everything about a subject, no one would read that. They will wait for someone to write a biography instead because it will be more interesting. Even though a machine could buy all your furniture, you would want an interior designer to buy your furniture to make it interesting. Machines can’t make things interesting. They don’t have style. That’s one of the things we learn in journalism school. Although you can write a boring story, writing a funny lead is better. A machine cannot make a pun.

There are some questions that you as a consumer would never ask, and those are the questions a journalist is meant to ask. I’m writing a short story using the NYT Chronicle where you can see the words they have used. A computer can tell you what words they’ve used, but a machine will never be able to say that it is interesting that the word “kale” was used as another word for money but now it is a trendy vegetable. A machine can’t pick out the things that are most interesting.

DL: How do you teach someone how to do that?

Cook: They are teaching that every day in journalism school, so I think you have to ask a journalism professor that. I feel that I learned that in journalism school, and from reading and editing a lot. I feel that they are successfully teaching students that.