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One question, if you're still taking them Aron - How many developers work on nytimes.com? We have a running conversation about this in our newsroom whenever we look at the site.
Thanks and great work!
Thanks for the kind words. The answer to the question depends on whom you consider a developer, so I'll give a few answers:
- The software group, which is responsible for the big, big infrastructure projects is around 90 I believe right now. These are the folks who are responsible for building and maintaining our verticals, APIs, CMS, registration, email, mobile, etc.
- My group is 10, including me.
- The incredibly talented multimedia group under Andrew DeVigal includes I believe five Flash developers right now.
- The also incredibly talented graphics desk has about the same number of people doing primarily web-oriented work.
There's also folks scattered about in other groups and departments, but that's pretty much the core group right there. It is a lot of people, but nytimes.com is massive, sprawling site, so even with all those folks it never seems like we have enough bodies to do all the things we want to do.
There you go..
aron
Great interview.
Questions: How do you get journalists to think like developers?
For example, I've been asked to give mini-seminars at work on everything from Social Media to basic HTML (which shows a pretty great willingness on the part of the editors, in my opinion, to learn) but nothing seems to stick. We (editorial, with a strong history in print) remain in a silo and our processes remain oriented around print.
Journalism schools have a real opportunity to lead here, which I am super glad to see many universities are realizing this.
Rich Gordon's incredibly forward-thinking project at Medill and Alberto Cairo's visual journalism track at UNC are both good examples. My old boss Brant Houston has some interesting things in the works at Illinois, and the program you're trying to start... also great examples. And I am sure you could name many, many more.
Though they all take different routes, what unites all these approaches is that they are teaching students to be both journalistically and technologically creative in the way they approach storytelling. A necessary step to that end is teaching reporters some fundamentals about how these technologies work under the hood, whether you're talking about data-driven web apps like the ones my group does, Flash interactives or other types of digital storytelling.
We ought to be sending the message, to journalism students in particular, that it's not OK anymore to just assume they can walk into a newsroom, turn a clever phrase and leave the "web stuff" to someone else because they don't "get it" (or, worse, don't have any desire to "get it"). That isn't the way things are heading.
On a practical level, I know a lot of schools are teaching these technologies in dribs and drabs (at least that's my perception based on my limited experience as an adjunct and interested outside observer -- so correct me if I'm wrong here). And unless things have changed radically in the last few years, generally these classes are considered add-ons, or, they are considered part of a specialty degree, and are not usually part of the core curriculum. They ought to be.
Teaching the fundamentals of traditional journalism is absolutely critical, but there should be equal emphasis given to ensure that all students understand the least the fundamentals of this new platform as well -- from the production end all the way to presentation.
Don't get me wrong: I'm not suggesting that every journalist needs to race out and buy a book on Python or ActionScript and become a cracker jack coder (not that it would hurt). But I do think all journalists should have some baseline understanding of these technologies, and classroom exposure to them -- even if they themselves can't code a lick.
I don't think this is a particularly radical suggestion. We've been teaching databases and spreadsheets in journalism schools for years now, and we're not doing it so students can balance their checkbooks. We're teaching them tools to do deeper, richer more engaging stories, and the same exact rationale applies to the web technologies I'm talking about.
OK, this is turning into a rant... a side effect of too much coffee too early in the morning. I hope that answers your question, at least in part.
On liens in particular, I'm not sure I'm completely understanding the question. Are you getting at the problem of documents that constantly are revised? If so, that's definitely something we'll need to address -- but I do think there are solutions so you can essentially version a document, much as you would source code.
(That would be a really useful feature regardless, but it might be a bit of a down-the-road thing, however.)
I'm responsible for a group of developers in the newsroom and we work on a range of projects, almost all of them collaborative. So, we worked with Graphics on those incredible election night maps -- they did the Flash; we made them go. We worked with multimedia in a similar capacity on Word Train, and so on. But we also do our own projects, such as our database of Gitmo detainees.
The point is, virtually nothing interactive on nytimes.com is exclusively the result of any one person's work. It is, as I said above, a very collaborative newsroom. The most collaborative I've ever been in.