Printed Matters

I almost missed the Winter 2008 Nieman Reports until this summary from E-Media Tidbits popped up in Google Reader. It’s an excellent collection of essays, well worth the read.

I won’t comment on all of them, but this one by Ed Roussel caught my eye, both for its general excellence and for the fact that it contains a self-contradiction, on that gets me where I live. Go have a read, form some thoughts, and come on back.

See the problem? It’s between point #7 and point #10.

In point #7, Nimble, low-cost structures:

Newspaper companies are bad at technology, so a digitally minded chief technology officer will be able to get cheaper and more effective services by outsourcing.

But then in point #10, Experiment:

Don’t be afraid of failure. Try new projects, see what works, and build on success.

See the contradiction? I’ll Dick and Jane it out.

Right now, nobody has the winning ticket. Nobody knows exactly how to make money from the web, how to maximize readership and engagement on websites, how best to reach readers where they want to be reached. We need lots of experimentation still. Lots and lots and lots of it.

We need developers working on local projects, figuring out how best to serve their specific communities. We need regional developers, figuring out how best (and when best to not) aggregate data from various local news websites. We need people on the huge national and international aggregation level, figuring out how best to serve news consumers from anywhere in the world. We need lots of developers at all levels, from a local paper, through corporate regional divisions, right on up to Google News, all working hard to figure out the new business models and tricks.

And we need people who are specifically interested in and knowledgeable of the news industry, familiar with all the literature, familiar with what has been tried and doesn’t work, familiar with the latest developments in news websites and what does work, interested and excited about saving journalism.

You really don’t want to be outsourcing it to a team that just finished making a big Flash-heavy website for some car company. Or a corporate Intranet. Or a straight e-commerce shindig. Different attitudes, different mindsets, different requirements. Totally, completely different.

And you definitely don’t want to source it all to some centralized corporate IT assembly, as I whined over here.

You want someone who is experienced at and expert in a nimble web programming language like PHP or Python or Ruby on Rails; someone who understands and respects web standards; someone who knows JavaScript and Ajax and especially when NOT to use them; someone who understands SEO and search and UI and IA. But at the same time, knows journalism and can write their ass off when they need to, and knows what kind of data can be attached to a story and what kinds of charts and tables and other visual aids can make the story better.

You need a guy that gets the web, deep down inside.

Oh, that’s me! OK, you need me. Publishers, you need a guy like me in every newspaper office, large and small, in the country. We’re fairly cheap, and worth our weight in gold. And we’ll make you look smart. Try one today!