I was one of Scott's early hires and he knows what he's talking about. ProPublica was conceived [1] as a place to do the old-school, indepth investigative journalism that newspapers did before newspaper revenue started tanking. I was hired as a web producer and ProPublica's work would still be going on today with a traditional web presence. But news application development was not necessarily baked into that mission. Now the developers work as journalistic peers with the investigative reporters, as well as developing tech, designing and deploying applications. That wouldn't be the case if Scott hadn't continued to emphasize that there's more to his group than just maintaining the website...such advocacy is needed even in a small, flat-hierarchy, forward-thinking organization.
Tech innovation isn't completely a rarity in the news biz. For example, Django, a python web framework, was created by devs at the Lawrence Journal-World newspaper. While I don't know for sure, I'd be very surprised to learn that someone up the chain was advocating there efforts at some point in its dev/adoption at the paper.
Very possible I missed it, but a story using data science in my opinion should be open source and reproducible using something like a data science notebook script.
This article reads as data scientist should be editors, which in my opinion makes zero sense. Sure understanding story is important, but editing ledes is a waste of time.
> Data science is a young occupation that could stand to take from these older pursuits. Whether it’s writing, cooking, or painting, editing is a core component of becoming a master of the discipline. Knowing when to hold back.
Data scienists working with editors on a story makes more sense. While not critical to the point, as far as I'm able to tell, John's never done any journalism.
Generally code relevant to anything but security is passed off in movies etc. as being relevant to security. It's interesting to see this phenomenon come full circle.
[1] https://www.propublica.org/about/press-release1