The newsonomics of “Little Data,” data scientists, and conversion specialists

This headline made me chuckle. One of my biggest disappointments while working at NYT Digital in the late 00s was that there were so many engineers. To organize them all, technologies and staff were piled into silos (eg the database team, the platform team, the frontend team), requiring painfully complicated communication for significant projects. Things moved very slowly there.

It was so bad that my department director jokingly recommended hastening a small, public-facing project by using Google Spreadsheets as a datastore, rather than deal with the overhead of involving the database team. I took his advice at face value and shipped the app quickly. He grinned, and said in a congratulatory tone, "you actually used Google Spreadsheets!" It was like a subversive victory.

Fat chance. If the NYTimes had hired more engineers, those engineers would have told management they needed to innovate to survive, just like everyone else was telling them. And management still wouldn't have listened.

What a surprise: a media dinosaur dismissing new technologies before it was too late.

Also, how about appropriately titling the link instead of paraphrasing the opening line?

They hired some very good ones. Jeremy Ashkenas (Backbone, Underscore, Coffeescript) and Sam Clay (NewsBlur, DocumentCloud) were both there.

To be fair, the NYT did hire, among many other technical talents, both Jeremy Ashkenas (Backbone/CoffeeScript) and Mike Bostock (D3), who may not be engineers by training, but are at the forefront of web and interaction technology.

But the problem isn't just number and/or quality of engineers. It's about top-down leadership and mindsets that encourage and cultivate engineer-led innovation. Sure, some of Google's early employees invented some huge projects with their 20% time, but that's because that was an engineering company that geared itself towards such projects. Media companies were huge money makers in the 90s and early 2000s. The money that spawns massive startups today would've been pocket change for them back then.

I can think of several other news agencies - other than NYT - who still haven't taken analytics seriously. This could be a blueprint for how to build the case.