whimsicality

Agree that it's very hard for academia to keep up with industry, and the shortcomings of the design of college majors. I still see value in a liberal arts undergraduate education, but that's awesome your school had more leniency with individual studies.

It doesn't exist as a formal major at the institution where I am pursuing my undergraduate degree. But yeah, there are some interesting overlaps @ the grad level. My school included, but that program is aimed at giving a journalism education to "hackers," and it's not meant to teach non-technical reporters how to code.

Author here.

Re [1]: True. But (a) that's a grad program and (b) it's aimed at giving programmers a journalism education, not teaching journalists how to code.

It's worth noting that our main news site, npr.org, is not all served from flat files. This is specific to our news applications team (apps.npr.org) and our client-side projects.