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Comment by zem | Hacker News Reader

the BBC sounds like it has a really good tech team too. wonder what it is about newspapers that leads to this sort of tech culture.

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An excellent profiler for perl, NYTProf [0], came out of New York Times. It's still actively developed and still kicks ass - outputs easy to grok flame graphs that you can click around on to zero into any statement. More than just finding bottlenecks, I find it useful to understand workings of new codebases...

[0] https://metacpan.org/pod/Devel::NYTProf

A desire to stay relevant. Print publishers often get criticized for being behind the curve, but a few like NYT and BBC have invested heavily in the technology of their business. Not sure how much it's paid off, but my impression is they aren't struggling as much as some.

I hope they manage to find the right combination to stay around, I loathe the dystopian future where Buzzfeed and Breitbart are the only news outlets.

Buzzfeed isn’t comparable to Breitbart at all. Buzzfeed does real journalism these days.

Their news coverage is pretty strongly slanted to the left. Just because I tend to agree with them doesn't mean I think they are really that much better than Breitbart in terms of providing objective reporting.

In any event, what I meant was that I don't want a future where we only have sources of "news" that serve to reinforce our pre-existing beliefs, with everybody siloed into their own particular little bubbles.

The NYT fortunately seems to be transitioning moderately well to digital at this point. They seem to have the wind at their back now. There was a period of time, spanning a decade or so, where it was very questionable if they'd make it or could survive on digital.

Their stock is at an 11 year high. Sales are growing again. Profitability looks set to surpass where they were several years ago. If it weren't for some stray costs & adjustments in Q4, they might have hit $100m+ in profit in 2017, the highest since 2010. Their balance sheet is solid, long-term debt is modest ($250m), and they have plenty of cash ($490m). Overall, it should be a good decade coming up for the NYT.

The BBC publish magazines but I wouldn't describe them as a print publisher.

They're a broadcaster.

True, I was thinking news in general.

Come hell or high water, the paper has to be on the newsstands the next morning. It is the very definition of mission-critical computing.

I worked on the Graun’s website/publishing backend in the late 90’s. Lots of Tcl/Tk.

It's a good melting pot for people who are passionate about writing, design, and ideas.

Kind of like how all of the best programmers have some kind of log or blog that they post in. While this could very well be some form of survivor bias, I think that just having to put effort into articulating your thoughts in a coherent way now and then improves other parts of your thinking.

I'd say it's desperation. The traditional business model of newspapers has been upended, and the ad driven model isn't really working out that well either. So instead of doubling down and riding it to the ground, some outlets are actually innovating and making cool stuff and throwing it against the wall to see what happens.

While I agree, I wouldn't think BBC would be dealing with those same pressures, being primarily (I think?) state-funded.

The BBC is state funded, through the TV Licence, for use within the United Kingdom, elsewhere it is funded on a commercial basis. The web site differs between domestic (no adverts) and international (adverts).

BBC Studios is the commercial arm of the BBC for licencing and distributing media outside of the United Kingdom.

https://www.bbcstudios.com/about/about-us/

Thanks. That's kind of you to say. We're also hiring. https://careerssearch.bbc.co.uk/jobs/search

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