Why my new year’s resolution is to learn about programming

January 30, 2010 by Erik Gable · 3 Comments
 

I’ve found myself quoting Steve Buttry a lot lately, particularly his posts about innovation in the news business. In an August 2009 post titled “Newspapers’ original sin: Not failing to charge but failing to innovate,” he wrote:

The disastrous error that newspapers made early in our digital lives was treating online advertising as a throw-in or upsell for their print advertisers. Helping businesses connect with customers was always our business. We were facing new technology and new opportunities and we did next to nothing to explore how we might use this new technology to help businesses connect with customers.

We just offered businesses the same old solutions that we offered in print, but pop-up ads and web banners somehow didn’t work as well as display ads. Which was just as well, because we told our business customers the ads weren’t worth much by the way we treated them.

For a long time, the way much of the newspaper industry handled the Web made about as much sense as trying to run a TV news broadcast by sending a newspaper reporter out to write a story, then feeding the text into an Amiga and making people watch as it scrolled across their TV screens. Or trying to make a TV commercial by pointing a camera at a Sears circular and filming as someone turned the pages.

But was this due to a failure of imagination on our parts — or was it something else?

Here’s what I keep coming back to:

If somebody in our building comes up with a unique idea in print — whether it’s for editorial, advertising or both — there are at least a half dozen people in the newsroom, and a half dozen more in the composing department, who know how to make it happen. But if it’s a unique idea for the Web … well, none of us are developers. Maybe we could make it happen, but maybe not.

The first newsroom I worked in after college had four full-time people in the newsroom. Every single one of us knew how to use QuarkXPress; every single one of us could lay out a page. I imagine it’s the same way at nearly every small paper: Working there and not knowing how to design a page would be almost unthinkable. But the chances of a small paper having a Web developer on staff are slim to none.

Most newspapers, regardless of size, are equipped to try new things in print. We have the tools, and we know how to use them. Online, not so much.

So this is my goal for 2010: to become as proficient with HTML and CSS — and Flash would be great as well — as with the tools of the print medium.  I don’t need to become a programmer or developer, any more than I can currently claim to be a graphic designer.  (I can’t, because I’m not.)  But I want to reach a level of basic competence, enough so that if somebody says “Hey, can we experiment with this new way of doing something?” I can confidently say “Yes, we can make that happen.”

Further reading:

Tags: , ,

Notes on Pew’s “where news comes from” study

January 11, 2010 by Erik Gable · 1 Comment
 

A “where news comes from” study by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism found that the vast majority of original reporting on six major news stories in Baltimore, Md., came from newspapers.

A nice little ego boost, certainly, for those of us who work for conventional media outlets. But what does it really mean — and what doesn’t it mean?

What it means:

  • That the bulk of original journalism on important news stories is still coming out of large organizations — primarily, though not exclusively, those that produce pulp-and-ink newspapers. (Although there is some disagreement on whether the study’s definition of news is valid or leads to the study being a self-fulfilling prophecy.)

What it doesn’t mean:

  • That the bulk of original journalism comes from newspapers because pulp-and-ink newspapers are inherently superior. Let’s not confuse the organization with the medium here — presumably most of the news organizations in question operate Web sites as well. Why give sole credit for these stories to the print medium? (A partial argument for this interpretation can be made by noting that, at most organizations that operate both a print product and a Web product, the print product still generates most of the revenue. But that’s not necessarily the way it will always be.)
  • That original journalism would go away if pulp-and-ink newspapers went away. To reach this conclusion, you would have to assume that no other medium would ever be able to fill that gap. It’d be like saying “Microsoft Windows is on 91% of all computers, so if Microsoft went away, computers would go away too.”

I love newspapers. I always have. I also believe there’s value in the existence of large newsgathering institutions with plenty of resources.

But, hey, old-media colleagues — let’s not make this study out to mean more than it really does, OK?

Further reading:

Tags:

My first journalism job

January 4, 2010 by Erik Gable · Leave a Comment
 

From 1989 to 1992, Pamela Hughes’ class at the Waldorf School of Cape Cod published a class newspaper called The Waldorf Weekly. We published 11 editions in all: six in third grade, four in fourth grade and one in fifth grade.

Headlines were mostly handwritten, stories were mostly typed on a manual typewriter, printing was done by photocopier, and the paper was illustrated primarily by clip art. (And I don’t mean the Microsoft Word kind of clip art — I mean the kind of clip art that had to be literally clipped from a page.)  Sports stories were accompanied by hand-drawn illustrations; we didn’t run any photos until the final issue, in 1992.

At the risk of being self-indulgent, here’s a collection of pages from The Waldorf Weekly, from the first issue to the last:

Tags: