Separating creator and creation

Historical figures and events are never as black and white as they’re presented in history classes. Shades of gray exist everywhere, just as they do in your everyday life. We present them simplistically for a variety of reasons, but nobody’s perfect.

So what do we do with Wilson? It’s never wrong to have a debate, to illuminate the issues of the past and the present. As to whether the name gets removed ... meh? Honestly, if the students are the ones who have to use it and they care so much, why not change it?

Talking to computers

The proper way most systems should be set up for, say, a medical insurance claim is that you fill out everything electronically so the data is in the right place and then an actual human can make an actual human judgment on your case. In practice, however, you fill out the form and the information whisks away to be judged by a computer using a predetermined set of rules.

If you're very, very lucky, there might be a way for you to appeal the computer's ruling to a human being (regardless of outcome/reason) — but even then, that person's power is often limited to saying, "well, the computer said you don't pass."

A Mini-Sociology of Rocket Cars

For the first few games I played, it was interesting watching the different skill levels (from brand new or just-out-of-single-player to pretty skilled players) interact with one another fairly frictionlessly. There'd be some frustrating boneheaded moves that might cost you a match, but it generally appeared to just be accepted as part of playing on a randomized team. When I played yesterday, though, things seemed to be getting ugly.

The first two matches went fine — a win, a loss. Then I got a string where I was teamed up with what one can uncharitably describe as spoiled babies.

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.

Unknowing

Having exactly zero musical education beforehand, I literally had no concept of things like “higher pitches,” or designating which was faster of eighth notes and triplets. One can argue that knowing those kinds of things were important to playing in the band, but that’s also the point of the class — to learn more.

Basically, a significant portion of my education (and free time, to an extent), was determined by a test that asked questions without ensuring that I even understood the answers.

The NSA is not lying

This, of course, turned to be completely false … from a certain perspective. Why, Edward Snowden released documents that indicated that millions of Americans were being spied upon by the NSA! That proves that Clapper lied!

Actually, he didn’t. He certainly wasn’t what I would consider forthcoming, but he didn’t technically lie. From his viewpoint, the NSA collected “metadata” on millions of Americans, and only incidentally — they did not “wittingly” collect “data.”

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.

Only as secure as you make it

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.

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.

Automation is supposed to help, not hinder

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.

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."

An annual autumnal anguish

Live like you’re responsible for someone else. You don’t have to make sure everyone you know is always happy, you don’t have to be available every time the smallest thing in life goes wrong … but at the same time, make it known that you’re available for people when they truly need help.

In the grand scheme of things, being available for that kind of comfort, advice or help is an incredibly small portion of your time, and will be a minuscule part of your life — but it could be huge for that other person.

Why I can't have nice things

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.

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.