How a Quartz reporter used code to break a news story

Ian Kar, future of finance reporter at Quartz, used his knowledge of coding to break a news story on Wednesday.

The story was, “Venmo, beloved millennial app, is finally trying to make some money,” and Kar reported, “Pay With Venmo will be a payment option for people shopping within apps, similar to the PayPal button that online shoppers are familiar with.”

The attribution that Kar used to verify this piece of news is what caught the eye of other business journalists. In the second paragraph, Kar wrote, “Based on publicly available code reviewed by Quartz.”

So, Talking Biz News asked the question: Do business journalists, particularly tech reporters, now need to know coding?

Here’s what we found out:

Kar has been learning programming in his spare time. He figured there could be something interesting in Braintree’s SDK and found the code because it’s publicly available on Github. In the SDK, the code said that Pay With Venmo was undergoing limited testing since early December. He verified it with a few programmers he knew, and they agreed that this was a new feature inside the SDK.

Said Kar: “Learning about programming can help reporters tell unique stories that might otherwise go unnoticed.”

Other tech reporters covered this story within the past 24 hours, after Kar’s story appeared.