The following is a guest post by Corey Takahashi, who attended a Poynter seminar for journalists and programming through a scholarship provided with Hacks/Hackers.

The key lesson I learned at Poynter’s first seminar on programming and journalism is how much overlap there already is between these two worlds, and the extent to which old-school reporting is at the heart of some of the industry’s most successful and innovative news apps and online features. PolitiFact’s Matt Waite told attendees that the “Truth-O-Meter,” a Web-based gauge of truth-telling by politicians, gets some of the most rigorous fact-checking at the St. Petersburg Times, precisely because the feature is designed to bluntly call out dissembling in a more direct way than a newspaper article.

Waite and Aron Pilhofer, editor of Interactive News Technologies at The New York Times, both stressed that media apps and Web features need journalistic analysis, context and even a “story” concept as their foundation. If you don’t have those elements before building a news app or providing an audience with data, you run the risk of presenting information in a way that’s overwhelming and confusing at best, misleading and potentially misconstrued at worst. I had a sense of this before the seminar, but it made a world of difference to see how leaders in the journo-programming scene actually pull their projects off.

What took me slightly by surprise was just how much journalism and programming are converging on the narrative end of the spectrum, too. I got to chat with fellow participant Jeremy Gilbert, an assistant professor at Northwestern University, who helped oversee the launch of the automated, sports-story-writing system, Stats Monkey.

Gilbert didn’t soft pedal the implications of the project. He said there are some (human) writers who should be worried about computers cranking out narrative copy, a la Stats Monkey. But he added that such systems could give other journalists more time to move up the value chain of journalism, to more original and analytical reporting. “This kind of ‘it-happened-here’ journalism–sure, we can automate that,” Gilbert told me. “But this much higher level of journalism, all of a sudden you’re free to do much more of that.”

I began to see his point once I recalled an argument I’ve heard from reporter-turned-TV-producer (and frequent media critic) David Simon. Simon has said that the only element that really elevates journalism into being “an adult game” is not the who, what, when, where, and how–but the why. The why is what’s difficult, and the why is what’s meaningful. Gilbert was making a similar point, and the programming ideas, conversations, and examples that resonated most with me at Poynter were the ones finding exciting new ways to answer that indispensable “why.”