#newspapers

Electioneering - Covering Election Day with data, maps and print

It's always a good idea to test your code — and I did. I swear.

My problem did not lie in a lack of testing, but rather a lack of testing using real numbers or real data. For readability purposes, the election results data numbers are formatted with a comma separating every 3 numbers, much in the way numbers always are in non-financial or -computer contexts (e.g., 1,000, 3,334,332).

FauxDB: Faking it by making it

There is one thing that any aspiring programmer must realize when they set out to replace a tool: YOU CAN'T REPLACE A TOOL AT THE HEART OF A MULTI-MILLION DOLLAR CORPORATION ON YOUR OWN. I knew this academically but, as is often the case when setting out on these adventures, my brain chose to heed that advice only when it was convenient to do so.

I often live by the mantra, "If someone else can do it, that means it's possible." It works well something like 75 percent of the time — it prevents me from feeling daunted when facing large projects, but it can be turned around as well.

Live journalism: Pushing to York Fair

Show people what journalism is, what interactive journalism can be. Show them it’s not all “a reporter shows up, talks to people, goes away and later something appears on the website/in the paper.” Show them that journalism can be curation from the public, soliciting input and feedback instanteously, that comes together in a package with our deep knowledge and library of photos of the area.

And I thought, “Damn. That sounds like FlappyArms.sexy, except actually relevant to journalism. I gotta get in on that.”

User-submitted photo galleries

It was what you’d call a “hard-and-fast” deadline: Our contract with Caspio for database and data services was changing on July 1. On that day, our account — which to that point had been averaging something like 17GB transferred per month — would have to use no more than 5GB of data per month, or else we’d pay to the tune of $50/GB.

Our biggest data ab/user by far was our user-submitted photo galleries. A popular feature among our readers, it allowed them to both upload photos for us (at print quality) to use in the paper as well as see them online instanteously. Caspio stored and displayed them as a database: Here’s a page of a bunch of photos, click one to get the larger version.

We had to come up with something to replace it — and, as ever, without incurring m/any charges, because we don’t have any money to spend.

Computers will not replace reporters, except when they will

No one is saying that all stories, or even most will be written by computers, but it’s not difficult to imagine that a good number of them will be simply because most stories today have significant chunks that aren’t deeply reported. They’re cribbed from press releases, interpreted from box scores or condensed from the wire. If we leave the drudge work to the computers, we can free up reporters to do things that computers can’t, and actually producing more, better content. It’s quite literally win-win. The primary losers are those companies who will buy too deeply into the idea that they can generate all their content automatically.

Using robots to improve photo upload workflow

What we wanted was an easy way to get photos from any device (photographers frequently work using only their phones or tablets, because it’s one less and/or lighter piece of equipment they have to lug around versus a laptop) and push it to three places — the web, print and our archive. The simplest solution seemed to be getting the file into our system and then moving it around from there.

Enter Dropbox. It’s extraordinary how even free services can do what used to require expensive services that were frequently more unreliable. Using the free 2GB Dropbox plan, we made sure that all of the devices were syncing to the same account, as well as to the “new” automater machine.

The rules are made to be broken

There's a reason the inverted pyramid exists and has been adopted by the journalism profession as the general template for telling a story: It makes sense for a lot of them. You start out with a very specific idea and then go broad the more you write. It keeps young writers from getting too bogged down in specifics, while also making sure they're not taking the 10,000-foot view on everything.

It's a guideline ... And that's all it should be: a guide. It's not inviolate, and it's by no means the best format for every story out there. Even more so than the idea that each story should be expressed in the best format possible, there are almost zero stories where a strict inverted pyramid is called for.

It's game time: Using Google Docs as a CMS

This problem was compounded when we decided on the scope of the project Our high school football coverage is run by GameTimePA, which consists of the sports journalists from the York Daily Record, Hanover Evening Sun, Chambersburg Public Opinion and Lebanon Daily News. The four newsrooms are considered a "cluster," which means that we're relatively close geographically and tend to work together. Since the last preview, however, GameTimePA had expanded to include our corporate siblings in the Philadelphia area, meaning we now encompassed something like 10 newsrooms stretching from Central Pennsylvania to the New Jersey border.

And we're all on different CMSes.

Rarely is the question asked, "Is our children tweeting?" This question is likely nonexistent in journalism schools, which currently provide the means for 95+ percent of aspiring journalists to so reach said aspirations. Leaving aside the relative "duh" factor (one imagines someone who walks into J101 without a Twitter handle is the same kind of person who scrunches up his nose and furrows his brow at the thought of a "smart ... phone?"), simple (slightly old) statistics tell us that 15% of Americans on the Internet use Twitter.

(This is probably an important statistic for newsrooms in general to be aware of vis-a-vis how much time they devote to it, but that's another matter.)

For most journalism students, Twitter is very likely already a part of life. Every introduction they're given to Twitter during a class is probably time better spent doing anything else, like learning about reporting. Or actually reporting. Or learning HTML.

I know this idea is not a popular one. The allure and promise of every new CMS or web service that comes out almost always includes a line similar to, "Requires no coding!" or "No design experience necessary!" And they're right, for the most part. If all you're looking to do is make words appear on the internet, or be able to embed whatever the latest Storify/NewHive/GeoFeedia widget they came out with, you probably don't need to know HTML.

Until your embed breaks. Or you get a call from a reader who's looking at your latest Spundge on an iPad app and can't read a word. Or someone goes into edit your story and accidentally kills off a closing </p> tag, or adds an open <div>, and everything disappears.

Suddenly it's "find the three people in the newsroom who know HTML," or even worse, try to track down someone in IT who's willing to listen. Not exactly attractive prospects.

Heck, having knowledge of how the web works would probably even help them use these other technologies. Not just in troubleshooting, but in basic setup and implementation. In the same way we expect a basic competence in journalists to produce their stories in Word (complete with whatever styles or code your antiquated pagination system might prescribe), so too should we expect the same on digital.

Especially in a news climate where reporters are expected as a matter of routine to file their own stories to the web, it's ludicrous that they're not expected to know that an <img> tag self-closes, or even the basic theory behind open and closed tags. No one ever did their job worse because they knew how to use their tools properly.

I'm not saying everyone needs to be able to code his or her own blog, but everyone should have a basic command of their most prominent platform. It's time we shifted the expectations for reporters from "not focused entirely on print" to "actually focused on digital."

Real-life ghost story

Some level of skepticism should be present. As debunking performs a fairly vital part of paranormal investigating, at least for Whispering Spirits, you'd expect the group to be somewhat wary of what it finds. You'd expect each of them (or at least some of them) to examine things with a critical eye, always naysaying each other and operating on a basis of "normal until proven not."

You'd also be wrong. Most of the debunking, it seems, falls to one man — Bobby.

Poems for our "bureau" reporter in Santa Fe, whose stories I'm always left waiting for when I'm laying out:

Sitting at my desk
wondering if you're still alive
unmoved either way.

Four stories at noon
two out, two new by midday;
none ever find me.

He's slaving away
Interviewing, contacting;
AP filed at 5.

A blank page, staring
waiting to be filled with news ...
Angry Birds high score!

It's not really new and it's not Mexico

Rest assured — or be disappointed, for that matter — my next stint does not involve starting my own snowplow company or buying an old ambulance and renting myself out as a medic for hire. I've managed to snag myself a gig as an online editor for the Farmington Daily Times, a small outfit in northwest New Mexico that produces some darn good journalism ... but could use some help on their interwebs (and, hopefully, I'll get to do a little copy editing and page design while I'm at it).

What's next

But none of that does any good. I know that's a tough prescription to take (much akin to a "Tough shit" offered when an accusation of unfairness is raised), but it's true. I struggled with it myself in those first few minutes after I went back to my desk after the meeting. I kept flashing back to that first meeting with the publisher, with the thoughts of loyalty running through my head: "I moved to Spokane, I quit my job, I gave my word that I wouldn't jump at the next incrementally better job ... You, on the other hand, laid me off/let me go/fired me six months in."

(These phrases sound like they're different, but only if you're not on the receiving end.)

Running roughshod

It’s pretty clear to everyone — people in the stands, his coaches on the sidelines, the other team’s defense — that the best way for G-Prep to win is to put the ball in his hands. Even if you know what’s coming (and since Sankey had 41 carries en route to 359 yards, it wasn’t exactly a secret), it’s still really hard to bring him down.

Small ball

Minor league baseball. Even the name sounds so ... inferior. “Minor league” has that connotation in today’s parlance: cut-rate. Second-fiddle.

Not good enough.

One year in

I don't often do much reflection, but this felt like a big step. Looking back on the one-year mark working at my college newspaper, the Washington State University Daily Evergreen, after getting involved on a lark. Then they put me in charge of the thing??