Most journalists [possess] daily computer skills that include Internet searches, word processing, and maybe some basic calculations in Excel, none of which enables journalists to truly mine large collections of data. Meanwhile, the amount of raw data available to journalists has mushroomed. At the federal level, the Obama administration’s “open government” initiative has given rise to new sources like Data.gov, a website devoted to the aggregation and easy dissemination of national data sets. State and local governments have followed suit, making much of the data they collect available online. More elusive tranches of data have been pried loose by nonprofit organizations courtesy of the Freedom of Information Act; an inquisitive journalist can download them in minutes. “I’m constantly amazed and surprised about what’s out there,” said Thomas Hargrove, a national correspondent for Scripps-Howard News Service who often leads data-based research projects for the chain’s fourteen newspapers and nine television stations.
via Serious Fun with Numbers
Programming is useful in all fields, even journalism. Very interesting article on data visualization, programming, and reporting. A reporter who knows how to disseminate large datasets into a database might be able to understand and derive more useful information than one who can't. That is, if the data is legitimate. There is potential for a dataset to be skewed in one way or another, and it's the reporters responsibility to fact-check just as they would any other reference or source.