Newsroom geeks have been instrumental in decoding the NSA story thus far. So too for corporate hacking and industrial espionage stories, as well as Bitcoin, cyberwarfare issues, and dark-web technologies. Mounting privacy and security concerns have journalists adopting encrypted communications and storage, often with guidance from the newsroom geeks because the barrier to entry is fairly high.

—My pal Tiff Fehr, who I’m proud to say I spent several years working alongside, says nerds will continue to play an important role in not just what news looks like but how it gets reported. Hopefully this means the old saw of becoming a journalist because you were bad at math gets a little less true.