But journalism students show what she sees as a lack of desire to learn about JavaScript, HTML, CSS and other tools to help tell a story on a web page, rather than the front page, Mulligan wrote in the Nieman Journalism Lab blog. It’s probably never been easier for students of any age to actually learn to code — there’s free or near free online coursework from Codecademy, the MIT/Harvard EdX program or Coursera. But Mulligan’s recommendation is that J-schools need to integrate these coding courses — or at least teach students about how web pages deal with or render their stories — into the base journalism curriculum.

Mulligan wrote:

We need to innovate our curricula, really looking at what we are teaching our students. Learning, or mastering, specific software is not properly preparing our future journalists for successful, life-long careers. No one can learn digital storytelling in a semester. Mastering Dreamweaver and Flash isn’t very future-friendly, and having a single mid-level “Online Journalism” course offered as an elective does more harm than good. We should be teaching code in all of our journalism courses — each semester, each year, until graduation.

There is growing belief in many quarters that software programming is no longer just for programmers – New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has promised to learn how to code; 6-year olds in Estonia may soon do the same. And with more news flowing through the web rather than print, what Mulligan proposes here is not surprising at all.

It’s our job as educators to remove fear of learning, a fear notoriously prevalent in journalists. HTML is not magic. Writing code is not wizardry; it’s just hard work. Learning to program will not save journalism and probably won’t change the way we write our stories. It is, however, a heck of a lot more fun being a journalist on the web once “how computers read and understand our content” is understood.

What is somewhat surprising, in my view, is the reluctance she sees among young would-be journalists to learn these skills. From what I’ve seen over the past few years, many young reporters are impressively proficient in these skills. It’s the geezers (ahem) who have a hard time with coding. But here’s the thing: Even geezers can learn. And if they want to stay employed, they will do so.

Feature photo courtesy of Shutterstock user argus

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Ongo was founded by former eBay and PayPal exec Alex Kazim and aimed to aggregate news while charging for some content from big newspapers. NYTco’s Martin Nisenholtz described Ongo as a “Hulu of news.” But as Nieman explains, the pricing scheme was confusing:

A basic Ongo subscription gave you access to content from The Washington Post and USA Today — but only “Top Stories” from Reuters, “Selected Content” from the Financial Times, and “Picks” from The New York Times. If you wanted to add more publications beyond the core offerings, those came at significantly varied prices — 99 cents a month for Slate, Salon, or Engadget; $3.99 for the Christian Science Monitor; $9.99 for the Chicago Tribune or The Miami Herald; either 99 cents or $14.99 a month for The Worcester Telegram & Gazette, depending on how much of it you wanted; and so on.

Some of the content that Ongo charged for was free on the publisher site. And to further complicate things, the New York Times launched its own paywall in March 2011, just a couple months after Ongo opened for business. At launch, Ongo charged $6.99 per month for a subscription; that cost was later lowered to $1.99, but it wasn’t enough to save the site.

Ongo’s closure leaves RR Donnelley’s Press+ as the largest standing paywall solution, with around 350 publications using the service. Press+ cofounder Gordon Crovitz recently proclaimed to the Wrap, “Paywalls won’t save news publishing by themselves, but…it’s the single biggest new source of revenue for papers.” But Ongo’s failure suggests paywall implementation may be best left to individual papers — and that readers don’t want to pay for an aggregation site.

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A new report by Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab suggests it could have been different indeed. Here’s six quick takeaways from editors reflecting on their former papers:

My new mantra for the newsroom would be we are a digital news operation with a print component. We are not a print newsroom with a digital component.

— Timothy Franklin, The Baltimore Sun (now at Bloomberg)

Any newspaper without strong investigative reporting is on the verge of becoming irrelevant.

– Ronnie Agnew, The Clarion-Ledger (now at Mississippi Public Broadcasting)

I’d start using photos taken by readers

– Mike Pride, former editor of the Concord Monitor

Almost everyone is overlooking the “people piece,” meaning the newsroom staffers who should care deeply about the quality of their work and feel good about it every day

– Skip Perez, former editor of The Ledger in Lakeland, Fla.

I would lead a crusade to convince journalists in the newsroom that they can no longer expect someone else to solve their problems.

– James O’Shea, LA Times (Recently of the Chicago News Cooperative)

We are surprisingly weak at facing down the stares from within our own newsroom .. I should have been braver at recognizing the difference between a reverence for the past and a reluctance to face the future.

– Amanda Bennett, former editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer

The rest of the Nieman Lab’s good work can be found here.

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There should be no friction when it comes to our readers getting in touch with us. That was the premise of starting my company, and that’s the premise I hold true today. We are who we are because of our readers, and they should have the ability to get in touch with us whenever they want.

While it might result in more email and more work for our team, customer service is part of any business. Communication with our readers is just that — judicious learning and improving from the folks who matter the most. As I said:

“I have learned so much…by being able to communicate with people on a one-on-one basis…That, really, is what’s behind this whole thing.

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You can read my post about our iPhone and iPod touch app and the philosophy behind the design here.