Surviving as an independent journalist in 2026 is hard. You're building an audience, figuring out revenue sources, navigating platforms, and trying to maintain editorial independence – all while platforms, aggregators, and AI systems reshape how information flows.
The work in front of journalists is daunting. A silver lining, though, is that other industries are going through their own disruptions right now and there may be pathways to create shared goals and fellowship. One industry with particularly striking parallels is software development.
Learn to Code
It is painful just to write the words out.
For those blessedly less familiar, that phrase bubbled up from comment sections and bad-faith-bot-replies during the waves of layoff in the late 2010s. It was a slur that emerged during round-after-round of journalism layoffs — a noxious suggestion that if journalists only just learned to code, our industry might not be in such rough shape.
Or maybe it meant coding would bring greater job stability? The bad-faith actors didn't seem too worried about the mechanics of it all. And now the “coding” industry is experiencing its own existential disruption as AI makes code compiling more autonomous — especially the last few weeks of accelerated advancements in Claude Code.
Of course, both “coding” and “writing” are skills that need an awful lot of context to capture what they mean within their respective industries. Strong, clean coding fuels software development much like strong, clean writing lifts any piece of journalism. Great coders are fundamental to any engineering department, just as great writers elevate newsrooms.
It's not a perfect parallel, but what is similar are the waves of change pummeling our industries.
Web development has changed drastically in the last 18 months. AI coding tools like Claude Code and GitHub Copilot have gained traction while overall programmer employment fell 27.5 percent between 2023 and 2025. Entry-level coding jobs have been particularly devastated. The tasks that junior developers used to cut their teeth on — debugging, boilerplate code, testing — are now increasingly handled by AI.
That echoes what's happened to entryways into journalism. Fewer metro dailies. Shuttered websites. Shrinking intern classes.
There have been through lines and crossovers between the fields of journalism and technology since newspapers first came online in the 1990s and radio’s evolution into podcasts, through RSS. There have been sucesful professional associations from the ‘computer-assisted reporting’ days of punchcards to modern forward-looking groups like Hacks and Hackers.
And yet, what we're living through right now feels seismic enough to define the next era.
Adapting in Parallel
Last week, Casey Newton published a piece in Platformer: Claude Code for Writers. In it, Casey walks through how he’s using AI to help him think and work: a searchable database of his own work, custom research interfaces, automation of tedious tasks.
The piece is worth reading for the specifics, but one of those striking things about it is how plain-spokenly ordinary Casey’s work and conclusions turn out. He’s dreamed of having such powerful tools, specifically built to support his journalism. This new technology allows him to do so in a straight-forward, documentable way. It’s revolutionary in it’s banality.
Just five months ago, NYU’s Hilke Schellmann tested AI tools for the Columbia Journalism Review and found their summarization utility promising, but lacking:
“We think using LLMs to produce short summaries may be immensely helpful for background research, though we still recommend a final fact-check by humans. As for the AI research tools for scientific literature that are currently on the market: They may save time, but right now, they lack the depth and consistency journalists need. For now, they are more hype than help. We will be watching to see whether the next wave of tools can do better.”
That was August 2025. By December, the widely-read technologist Simon Willison captured the scale of change pretty succinctly in his end-of-year wrap-up:
"In 2023, saying that LLMs write garbage code was entirely correct. For most of 2024 that stayed true. In 2025 that changed, but you could be forgiven for continuing to hold out. In 2026 the quality of LLM-generated code will become impossible to deny."
And then, a few weeks later, The influential Substack The Pragmatic Engineer riffed on Simon's take with a forward-looking piece that lays out what this might all mean for the software industry in day-to-day work product terms:
The Alliance Opportunity
The optimist in me sees a convergence of opportunities. Independent journalists need technical skills to build sustainable operations. Technologists increasingly understand media problems — and many of them are becoming media makers themselves. The Pragmatic Engineer, written by Gergely Orosz offers informed commentary and regularly references his code of ethics in his writing.
As Ryan, Liz and I launch The Independent Journalism Atlas, we've been thinking about this in terms of infrastructure. How do we build the systems that help independent journalism creators thrive? Discovery, standards, fair partnership frameworks and, yes, durable, reliable systems to do a multitude of jobs that could be better accomplished by a little robot help.
The disruptions hitting software development are creating potential allies — people who understand the economics of individual practice, who are building audiences around their expertise, who bring a different skillset and problem-solving perspective, who are navigating the same platform dynamics. People like Lenny Rachitsky, who built his product management newsletter into a million-subscriber business after leaving Airbnb. Or Simon Willison himself, who has become as much a public intellectual as a technologist through his prolific documentation of AI's evolution. Or even one of the co-founders of Claude, Jack Clark, who wrote a poetic essay about these changes on his Substack this week.
These are fellow travelers on the same path confronting the same existential questions. They are mission-aligned allies we can and should be building alongside.
What This Means for Journalists
I've been thinking about what it means to build alliances across these fields. Some practical ideas:
Learning from adjacent disruptions. What software engineers are discovering about working with AI tools is directly relevant to how we build journalism practices. How they’re using their tooling to develop products can, should and will be the tools of news-gathering and distribution of the future — one way or the other. Dev communities have always been radically transparent and documentation-friendly. There's gold in those log-sheets! Curious journalists can read and listen to these candid reflections from technologists. For the practical insights, tips and tools. From prompt libraries to agentic how-to’s.
Building shared infrastructure. The same systems that help independent journalists get discovered and build sustainable practices could serve technologists, product thinkers, marketers, or anyone building audience-based businesses. Systems builders, publishers, and funders should be looking for these opportunities in their pipelines.
Finding those fellow travelers. We can clearly see our peers and colleagues starting newsletters or creating vertical videos. We should seek out ways to connect with counterparts in technology. This might mean following the blogs, newsletters, or podcasts of technologists. Or following hashtags about coding on social media. Technologists and product leaders are "building in public" and developing new projects, companies, and roles in a "0-1" environment. Those are good keywords and concepts to look for when you're scanning the web and social media these days.
The disruptions hitting journalism aren't unique to journalists. The solutions we develop will be stronger if we work with others to build them.
If you're working in software development and thinking about these parallels, I'd love to hear from you. Reach out at [email protected]. The coalition we're building is bigger than journalism alone.
Justin, a frequent contributor to Project C, is a co-founder of The Independent Journalism Atlas, a principal/founder of Better Media Studios and blogs about better media products at Get Better.
