I’m interested in both and can get into Data Science with both, but I’m mainly asking myself which one would be better paired with a career in journalism? (data journalism)
Probably statistics. A lot of journalists seem to struggle with stats so that could give you an advantage. You can pick up a lot of programming skills in a stats program. You can even lean into statistical programming if you want. I think you’d have to seek out the more advanced programming side of a statistical degree but it is there and I think stats is harder to learn than the coding skills you need for data science.
This. I’ve done a bit of all of it (science trained), and worked with others too. People with good science and stats backgrounds seem to have a better grasp of the pitfalls of data analysis. People with only software or data science background sometimes struggle with stats concepts.
Basically, it’s easy to pick up enough coding and data viz skills by yourself if you understand the stats. But it’s NOT easy to pick up statistics by yourself if you only understand coding and data viz.
As a software engineer, I’d say statistics is more useful for journalism. If in doubt, you could be analysing papers about entirely different fields, like physics or biology or whatever. Those also deal with statistics.
But I also just feel like there’s not terribly much journalism to be done surrounding computer science. There’s the bog standard news cycle of tool XYZ had a new release, but beyond that, it’s more a field where techies try out or build things and then they tell each other about it.
I guess, you could also consider some of the jobs adjacent to computer science / software engineering, like technical writer or requirements engineer or project/product owner. In some sense, the latter two involve interviewing customers and their domain experts to figure out what’s actually needed.
Having said that, to my knowledge you typically get into these roles by being a software engineer and then just taking on those tasks regularly enough until someone notices…