Probably statistics. A lot of journalists seem to struggle with stats so that could give you an advantage. You can pick up a lot of programming skills in a stats program. You can even lean into statistical programming if you want. I think you’d have to seek out the more advanced programming side of a statistical degree but it is there and I think stats is harder to learn than the coding skills you need for data science.
this post was submitted on 31 Mar 2025
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This. I've done a bit of all of it (science trained), and worked with others too. People with good science and stats backgrounds seem to have a better grasp of the pitfalls of data analysis. People with only software or data science background sometimes struggle with stats concepts.
Basically, it's easy to pick up enough coding and data viz skills by yourself if you understand the stats. But it's NOT easy to pick up statistics by yourself if you only understand coding and data viz.
This has largely been my experience as well. I work as a statistician and it seems like the folks who arrived at data science through a CS background are less equipped to think through data analysis. Though I suppose to be fair, their coding skills are better than mine. But if OP wants to do data journalism, of the sort Pro Publica is gearing up for, then a stats background would be better.
As a software engineer, I'd say statistics is more useful for journalism. If in doubt, you could be analysing papers about entirely different fields, like physics or biology or whatever. Those also deal with statistics.
But I also just feel like there's not terribly much journalism to be done surrounding computer science. There's the bog standard news cycle of tool XYZ had a new release, but beyond that, it's more a field where techies try out or build things and then they tell each other about it.
I guess, you could also consider some of the jobs adjacent to computer science / software engineering, like technical writer or requirements engineer or project/product owner. In some sense, the latter two involve interviewing customers and their domain experts to figure out what's actually needed.
Having said that, to my knowledge you typically get into these roles by being a software engineer and then just taking on those tasks regularly enough until someone notices...
I'm not as sure. EFF does a fair amount of important reporting to hold big tech companies accountable. The same goes for Check My Ads. Obviously there's places like The Verge, WIRED, and TechCrunch. Right now politics and tech are pretty intertwined. Having folks with a more technical background cover stories could be pretty beneficial for asking better, deeper questions
I think if you're willing to put in the work to learn programming it could give you a pretty big leg up understanding the people and culture surrounding tech. It's also a decent backup career option
Data science. CS is going to be programming and learning about things like registers and ram allocation. Data science sounds more like what you're describing
Which statistics program is it?
Depends on the programs, but likely statistics if it is a halfway decent program.
- Statistics is harder to learn on your own than the CS needed for data science. So it's better to go statistics and then you can learn the CS parts on your own before doing a data science program.
- There's generally a bigger need for statistical foundation than CS foundation in data science, or at least with the angle for any data science needed for data journalism.
This article is worth a read, despite the mildly obnoxious title: https://scribe.rip/https:/towardsdatascience.com/data-science-is-not-science-bb95d783697a