OpenNews: Why Develop in the Newsroom?
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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!
The application closes August 11.
More importantly, it's worth noting that they're doing some amazing work there.
Lots of companies do this already across many sectors.
EDIT: It's still cool though.
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.
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.
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.
There's a "Show Your Work" movement in the news+tech community that's pretty popular, and making its way into stories too. Check out http://www.propublica.org/article/why-cant-linda-carswell-ge... for example.
PS: While this is a very small step in the right direction, it's very small.
Pretty exciting stuff, and I can't wait to see what they do next.
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?