2. The skills needed to succeed
By 2030, it is estimated that 1 in 2 Australian jobs will require either high-level programming, coding, or software design skills (Regional Australia Institute & National Broadband Network 2016, p. 10). The ABC has ten jobs currently listed on its Careers Page, four of these have the word ‘Digital’ in their title (ABC Careers 2018). The skills listed within their position descriptions include “maintaining a good awareness of industry developments…including software” and “experience in digital content production systems and tools” (ABC Careers 2018). Furthermore, journalism education across the globe has made its connections with computer science one of its top priorities (Lewis & Usher 2016, p. 554). Put simply, I need at least basic programming skills if I want to get ahead in the communications industry.
My introduction to the world of web scraping experience started with Digital Ocean’s intro to working with Web Data, using Beautiful Soup, Requests, and Python 3. Within class, I’d already learnt how to create a virtual environment on my computer, which helped a lot in completing the first few steps of this tutorial. The scrape was quite fittingly of the Mock Turtle’s song in Alice in Wonderland, which the program, Beautiful Soup was named after. After ha;f an hour of running through the tutorial, and I’d completed my first ever scrape (or more accurately — parse) of the web.
I now knew the absolute basics of web scraping, including:
- How to collect a webpage.
- Parsing with Beautiful Soup.
- Creating one tag per line.
- Understanding what ‘nested’ tags are.
- Using the find() and find_all() functions.
But to move forward in my project, more intermediary skills will be needed than this. Digital Ocean’s tutorial is fantastic for creating a base knowledge of what exactly data scraping is, but Dataquest’s tutorial provides a more detailed breakdown of the functions of web scraping, as well as how the information gained from web scraping can be inputted into a Pandas library. Throughout this tutorial, I learnt:
- How to check that a page request won’t produce an error.
- Within a nested tag, items are counted from zero, not from one (i.e. if you want the third ‘p’ element of a class, you would request for [2]).
- How to pull data from classes and ids.
- Using the Chrome inspector to find the information you want from a webpage.
- Creating a DataFrame using Pandas.
Even so, these skills still only form a base level of understanding of web scraping and the exercise was completed within a relatively controlled environment. ABC News Online has 248 web pages worth of articles on Immigration since the start of 2012, the year that both Manus and Nauru detention centres were reopened by the Australian Labor government. In order to execute this project, I need to build on these initial tutorials. More importantly, according to Lewis and Usher (2013, p. 603), I need to learn “hacker journalist” skills, including creating “computationally derived forms of journalism, such as data visualizations, software applications, news algorithms, and other coding-based projects” if I want a long-term career in the world of communications.
Reference List
ABC Careers 2018, Job Search, Sydney, viewed 16 September 2018, <http://careers.abc.net.au/caw/en/listing/>.
ABC Careers 2018, Digital Producer — Position Description, Sydney, viewed 16 September 2018, <http://careers.abc.net.au/caw/en/job/500026/digital-producer>.
Lewis, S. & Usher, N. 2013, ‘Open source and journalism: toward new frameworks for imagining news innovation’, Media, Culture & Society, vol. 35, no. 5, pp. 602–619.
Lewis, S. & Usher, N. 2016, ‘Trading zones, boundary objects, and the pursuit of news innovation: a case study of journalists and programmers’, Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, vol. 22, no. 5, pp. 543–560.
Regional Australia Institute & National Broadband Network 2016, The future of work: setting kids up for success, 1 November, viewed 16 September 2018, <https://www.thefutureofwork.net.au/Download/File/TheFutureofWork_ReportNovember2016.pdf>.