Hacks, Hackers, and the Expansive Boundaries of Journalism

This chapter begins with an examination of some of the complexities and opportunities afforded by the rise of these computationally minded journalists, collectively discussed here as 'interactive journalists' – an umbrella term that delineates this fusion of programming, data, and journalism from other points in journalism's long entanglement with computation. Newsrooms have had internal and externally focused hackathons to drive innovation, taking cues from the Hacks/Hackers group's role as a conveyor and culture-bridger for technologists and journalists. The boundaries of journalism are increasingly blurred as new entrants from people to new forms of news expand the field. However, the terms 'data journalist', 'programmer journalist', and 'hacker journalist' are much blurrier. As the divergent potential for tracing interactive journalism's history might indicate, defining the field with some coherence has been difficult – with some scholars wondering whether it even makes sense to have a clear definition.