Tag: tech

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.

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.

Again, I understand the basic impetus behind this line of thinking. But it fails on two levels, both of them human. One: If you make it in the employee’s best interest to not share vital strategic or business information with a competitor, that employee (provided he/she is acting rationally) will not do so. This worry is, at heart, an admission that a company is not providing its employees with the proper incentive to act against the company.

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.

These are what we’ll call sensible (though regrettable) redundancies. But the problem with technological innovation is that we think that any problem, with enough sufficient amounts of tech wizardry thrown at it, will disappear.

The flaw with this philosophy is that, much as with medicine and side effects, sometimes the troubles with the cure are worse than the problem it was trying to solve.

People who have seen new technology come into use view the technology only in terms of its functionality, a means to an end. Cellphones (and smartphones) are not their lifeline to life itself, they're a means of communication. Sure, they'll learn how to Facebook on the go, post Instagrams to Twitter and message their unruly teen to make sure he gets home before curfew, but if you took it away they'd still survive. They've got paper address books, landlines and actual (still digital, usually) cameras that aren't grafted onto a phone.

Hoo boy! As a [technology writer/reporter without a story idea/old person], I've seen my share of changes in life. But [new product] is about to completely alter [area in which new technology will have extremely slight impact].