We are exactly one month away from the August 16th deadline for applying for the 2015 Knight-Mozilla Fellowships, and this is the perfect time for you—the people actively wrangling data, building news apps, and designing interactives in newsrooms—to help chase amazing candidates toward the Fellowship application. We’ve assembled a one-stop shop of your arguments for joining development teams in news organizations, along with some of our former Fellows’ experiences and exhortations to future candidates.

Do you know someone who loves to code and would flourish in a newsroom? Please send them our way. And if you’re having trouble convincing them, please send them here or forward a few of these links along to help them see the light.

It’s the Culture Aaron Williams, of the Center for Investigative Reporting, says developers should apply because newsroom development culture is more varied, less trolly, and way more fun. He also has the best blog header design on the planet, so check that out. NPR’s Brian Boyer digs into the culture differences and what they mean for a developer’s career: Every day, I get to work with some of the smartest folks I’ve ever met, each a savant for some interesting and important subject. One week I get to learn about science, or the law, the next is business, or politics. And, bonus, they’re all squeaky wheels – the kinds of people who cause a fuss in all-staff meetings. Challenging your superiors doesn’t always go so well in corporate America. But speaking truth to power is a journalist’s job. In the newsroom, I feel like I’ve found my people. Plus, every story is a chance to try something new. We rarely work on a project for longer than a couple months. And when we’re done, we update our kit with what we’ve learned. Even at the most agile tech shops, you eventually get stuck with some legacy crap for a year. We get to reboot every week. And as a result, I’ve never seen a software team learn this fast. Also along culture lines, Sisi Wei, Jeremy B. Merrill, Stephen Suen, Lena Groeger, and Mike Tigas at ProPublica put together a GIF-centric blockbuster list of the top 10 reasons you should work in a newsroom, including my favorite, “You’ll be on a quick development cycle, and publish code on a regular basis.” Lastly, the AP’s Michelle Minkoff breaks down the practical meaning of newsroom code culture in a stellar 10-point list worth reading in full, including points about a culture of intense curiosity: No detail is too small to merit a second (or hundredth) glance. When you get excited over an intricate problem you solved, you’ll have people to share it with. And you’ll hear interesting stories from them. Asking continual whys in pair programming is not just acceptable, but encouraged. There’s a special mix of having independence in your idea. Learning technical and editorial knowledge from others is key here. You don’t need to do it alone, or with people just like you. You need resources in myriad areas, who are ready and willing to contribute. …and a note about the inclusiveness of news organizations, where “the judgment is reserved for the work. Your gender, race, even experience level is not as important as the quality of your intellectual work.”

Civic-Minded Code, In and Out of the Newsroom 2013 Fellow Mike Tigas, now at ProPublica, reminds potential applicants that it’s not just about journalism–it’s about making things better for more people, in all kinds of ways. the community of civic-minded programmers and data people is huge now. It’s not just journalists anymore—there are people who want to help improve government, health, education, help make history more accessible, and on and on, outside of the guise of news media. There are communities of people who want to work together to do great things for the world, and these formerly-disparate communities are starting to mingle and work together in interesting. I’ve had the opportunity to visit the MIT Center for Civic Media a couple times and been blown away at the variety and scope of projects there—from free speech to gender to robots to accountability in developing nations. I’ve met the excellent people at the New York Public Library Labs team and had a chance to hack on historic geodata alongside geo developers that created the state of the art. And if you’re already in the civic hacking scene, 2013 Fellow Friedrich Lindberg explains why the newsroom is where you should hone your craft: … the best place to learn how to engineer great civic applications is in a newsroom. Working to create narratives that feed into a news cycle, address a wide audience and tell a clear story is an amazing challenge for any technologist. Being involved in journalistic projects as a fellow puts you in the center of a three-way interaction between reporters, the data at the core of your story and the technologies used in its presentation.…During the past few months, I’ve met people from all across the globe and learned about their ideas and work. This is a great time to be involved in this discussion, and the fellowship will put you right at the center of it. From the other side of the journalist-coder aisle, Tasneem Raja of Mother Jones explains why she made the switch from straight reporting to the dark side as a hacker-journalist. Likewise, former Fellow Sonya Song (now at Harvard’s Berkman Center) explains why the Knight-Mozilla Fellowship (and newsroom coding in general) is a fantastic experience for graduate students.