A professional programmer has joined the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications in a partnership to work with students with innovative ideas, even if they don’t have programming experience.

Newhouse’s Chair of Journalism Innovation, Dan Pacheco, has enlisted the help of MIT Media Lab graduate Dan Schultz to help students develop their ideas. Hiring a professional programmer is meant to help these students turn their ideas into reality while bypassing the technical part of the development process.

Schultz is this year’s first in-house visiting programmer to Newhouse. He gave a lecture at Newhouse called “Hacking Journalism” in February.

Schultz previously worked at The Boston Globe. He has also worked on projects like NewsJack, Truth Goggles and The Ononeon, according to his personal website.

The partnership is part of an effort to tap into a growing “hunger among journalists and civic-minded programmers in Syracuse to collaborate,” Pacheco said in an email.

Pacheco said Schultz’s work at Newhouse will allow for students from other schools, such as the L.C. Smith College of Engineering and Computer Science or School of Information Studies, to work with Newhouse students and develop their ideas.

Schultz said he hopes to use his skill set to help students work on their ideas, even if they aren’t familiar with programming.

“In the same way you can make something amazing out of Legos without knowing how to mold plastics, you can make something amazing on the Internet without knowing how to program,” Schultz said in an email.

Alex Kuzoian, a senior television, radio and film and English and textual studies major, said programming skills are important to the communications industry since people are always connected to their devices.

“News and entertainment is moving more and more to the Internet. If we want to survive in the industry, we need to keep up with technological innovation,” he said.

Schultz, the programmer, said his goal is to create more resources, and maybe even a course, for students where they have the ability to turn their ideas into reality.

Said Schultz:  “I’m most excited to learn about what sorts of goals the students have. I have no idea what to expect!”

Published on September 5, 2013 at 1:15 am