Use your awesome tech powers to help save journalism | Hacker News Reader

Use your awesome tech powers to help save journalism

andymboyle.com

21 pointsandymboyle9 comments

Journalism needs web developers and technologists, folks. And there are lots of jobs open. You should think about applying.

Open articleView on HN

Not on the list (yet), but DocumentCloud is also hiring news-conscious hackers to help work on reader annotations, visualizations, text analysis -- for the documents behind the news -- and then open-source it all.

http://www.niemanlab.org/2011/07/with-its-newest-round-of-kn...

https://www.documentcloud.org/opensource

What documents, you may be asking ... well, current events like:

http://documents.latimes.com/usa-v-aaron-swartz/

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/interactive/2011/jul/15/rebe...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/phone-hacking/8634372...

If you're interested, you can reach me at jeremy at documentcloud . org.

Hi Jeremy, Where are the offices of DocumentCloud at? Really nice project and open source software like backbone.js by the way.

The thought that anyone should need to save a business model is mind-boggling to me. If it works, it'll make money. If it doesn't make money, people don't want it enough.

It's not like there are only a few newspapers in this country and that they could go extinct while people still want to buy them.

So I can go get a job at a failing business, try my best to fight through bureaucracy and get people to rethink how they've done things, for, I don't know, a century, and have my work not understood or appreciated? Awesome!

As someone who works in newspapers, I cannot tell you how accurate this is.

Never said it wouldn't be a challenge. And I don't agree about the work not being appreciated. Sometimes it isn't understood, yes, but tell me how many insurance salespeople understand how the complex web forms they're filling out work?

And part of the disruption of the news industry can come from within. You can probably always find regular work as a web developer/technologist somewhere. But you won't often find a place that gives you more exposure and a louder voice.

If there's good, visionary leadership who wants change and has the full support of the board and needs engineering and other teams to make it happen then I agree with you. But if it's just a development job that are opening up as part of a panic-induced reaction to save their business model they're already doomed. No developer can fix an industry from inside a business model that doesn't really want to change. Sure, change can come from within, but it has to be nurtured and supported from the top.

Depending on the organization, it may not be "panic-induced" at all. The NYT is on fairly solid financial footing and have been doing innovative things for a long time because of their heavy investment in developer and data positions, including bringing in Jeremy, who's since put forth CoffeeScript, underscore, and backbone.js

There are other newspapers that are floundering and are basically looking for someone to take care of the CMS and anytime the server flops. But this is something you discern from their job description and initial inquiry. So, to say, "who'd want to work for that dying industry" is like vowing to never work for a tech startup because of their numerous failures in comparison to the few success stories.

Fair point, but isn't the NYT the exception that validates my gross generalization?

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