OpenNews: Why Develop in the Newsroom?

http://sinker.tumblr.com/post/27833803775/opennews-why-develop-in-the-newsroom

by knowtheory • 14 years ago

37 18 14 years ago

sinker.tumblr.com

knowtheory2• 14 years ago

Particularly with all of the wailing and gnashing of teeth over the supposed demise of news, it's worth hearing from folks who actually work in these environments.

More importantly, it's worth noting that they're doing some amazing work there.

dansinker5• 14 years ago

These videos were created in part to help spread the word about the Knight-Mozilla Fellowships, which place developers, hackers, and tech-minded folks into newsrooms around the world to do open-source development, travel the world hacking the news, and much more. Tons of info here: mozillaopennews.org/fellowships/

The application closes August 11.

danso2• 14 years ago

About 5 - 10 years ago, the status quo was to have developers be part of the business side of news orgs, that is, controlled by the ad people...not necessarily a bad thing, but a situation wholly different than what is being discussed in the OP, where hackers are helping to advance the news product and reportage.

I'm having trouble thinking of other professions in which developers work inside the "prized" group of the organization -- in this case, editorial -- rather than as contractors or part of the IT group. Maybe programmers in the certain sectors of the financial industry?

dansinker5• 14 years ago

I think you're right: There's a real shift now in newsrooms as they realize the value of having developers involved in the editorial process and the power in creating web-native news experiences.

jessevondoom• 14 years ago

I know Dan and a few of the others involved in this project and their passion is both amazing and warranted. Data is becoming and indispensable tool in the modern newsroom, and it makes sense that the pairing of seasoned journalists and creative developers is key to uncovering new stories today.

Pretty exciting stuff, and I can't wait to see what they do next.

odacrem• 14 years ago

This is great stuff!!! It truly is an exciting time to be working in news/media.

It is absolutely the case that mixing, mashing, hacking and building are a means-of-expression as vital to news/media as words and images.

A key ingredient in our sauce over here at Vox Media (SB Nation, The Verge and soon Polygon) is a break with the old pattern where technology and development teams are considered (at the organization and conceptual level) to be utilities or tool providers for editorial and business initiatives.

Rather, we embrace what internet native reporting and story telling require: an organization and mindset where editorial, business initiatives and technology are intertwined together like some kind of triple helix.

This sounds like business speak but what it really is a tough challenge - one that is very exciting and one that is creating some pretty great opportunities for creative people and builders.

The Knight-Mozilla OpenNews initiative looks like a great a way to get involved and I very much look forward to the ideas and things this fellowship program produces.

Cheers!

rabidsnail6• 14 years ago

David Nolen is really involved in the Clojure community (core.logic, core.match, clojurescript). I had no idea he worked at the Times.

dansinker5• 14 years ago

The talent the Times has managed to build up on its dev team is pretty unbelievable.

rabidsnail6• 14 years ago

What's the difference between news and information? Is it just freshness? Is the story format really the best way to convey the state of the world to the individual person on the other end of the wire, or is it just the best format for broadcast?

My main frustration with The News is the story format. Not only do I have to spend the mental energy of reading the story, but I have to spend _more_ mental energy unraveling the narrative into its primary sources. Often that's actually impossible to do and I end up giving up and not reading the rest of the story.

danso2• 14 years ago

Right...which is the purpose of having devs in the newsroom, to increase the variety of storytelling formats that the newsroom has, particularly for the online medium.

Unfortunately, as most newsrooms have journalists trained almost exclusively in the narrative format, it's not a trivial task to conceive stories that are told differently than they are in print.

rabidsnail6• 14 years ago

I don't just object to the narrative format, I object to telling stories. I don't want a more interactive newspaper, I want a more accessible Bloomberg terminal. Everyblock seems to be a step in this direction, and I wholeheartedly approve.

dansinker5• 14 years ago

I'd say that the difference between "news" and "information" isn't freshness, but relevancy. There's a lot of information out there that doesn't have relevancy to a user. When it does, that information transitions from simply being "information" into "news."

In terms of story, we are as a culture oriented toward story and narrative. I think that's been true for forever. Cave paintings are remnants of ancient narratives (and of the point that information (there are buffaloes) becomes news (there are buffaloes near us, so we killed them) in the same way that newspapers reflect the remnants of more recent narratives and how all sorts of information delivery vehicles now contain narratives today.

The key thing about The News today though is that it's still pretty reflective of old forms, and that's probably where your frustration with the story format comes in. Those old forms actually made sense when they were created, in part because they reflected the needs of the delivery systems.

Of course now the needs of, say, telegraphs during the civil war (which is where the "reverse pyramid" system was created) is a silly way to make your news.

Which is why what some newsrooms and devs are doing to blow up the story, to start thinking about how to put information across in ways that are exciting and new and reflective both of medium but also representational (and respectful) of the information itself is pretty damn kick-ass.

I'm thinking of something like this:

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/06/11/sports/basketb...

There's actually a lot of narrative there, but it's narrative in a very different way than we'd normally think about it. There's a ton of information there as well, but it's been touched in really thoughtful ways.

Things like this, which are happening more and more every day, make me super excited.

PS. WOW that was a long answer.

rabidsnail6• 14 years ago

I think we're saying basically the same thing, but you're more patient than I am (and possibly more willing to compromise).

3amOpsGuy• 14 years ago

I think i've missed the point. How is this any different from sitting RAD (as in "rapid application development") guys in your business teams?

Lots of companies do this already across many sectors.

EDIT: It's still cool though.

rabidsnail6• 14 years ago

You kill the project (or at least put it in maintenance mode) even if it gets traction.

OpenNews: Why Develop in the Newsroom?

Related Stories