Do they pay a ‘living price’ for newspapers on Mars?

David Herrera,

The following quote comes from a journal article called Is an Honest and Sane Newspaper Press Possible?, by “An Independent Journalist,” published in the American Journal of Sociology in 1909.

If no magazine writer has yet included this quote in the beginning of an article before eventually coming around to, “The year? 1909,” someone surely will eventually.

The question of complete editorial independence is a very delicate one, and it is not a theory but a condition that confronts us in dealing with it. The situation would be infinitely healthier if readers had been “brought up” on the right principle of paying for value received, as they do in the case of other comforts and luxuries. That men otherwise liberal and extravagant should insist on getting a 3-cent paper for 1 cent, or a 5-cent paper for 2 cents is a phenomenon that would puzzle a visitor from Mars, where, we must hope, newspapers command a “living price.”

‘Show your work’: a personal progress report

David Herrera,

In September I attended the 2011 Online News Association conference in Boston, where I met some great, smart people, including plenty of fellow budding journo-geeks.

As part of the conference I was also lucky enough to receive some encouragement, training, and offers for help from the established community of journalist-programmers. In return for their generous effort I promised myself that I would involve myself more in the community of journalists and developers.

In that spirit, I’m here to publicly evaluate my progress in the last two months — on Django, contributing, and showing my work.

Django and Python

In a thank-you email to Michelle Minkoff shortly after the conference, I said I would post to my blog about my plans for Django and what I would build first.

Well, I never wrote that post. I did tear into the tutorial offered on the Django website, but lost steam about halfway through. Eventually I finished the tutorial, but by the end I was phoning it in.

That was the disappointing extent of my Python work until this weekend, when I attended the daylong Intro To Python Workshop organized by PyLadies and ONA LA. I left the workshop feeling much more comfortable with the basics of writing Python code. And after a good discussion about Django with Katharine Jarmul I feel ready to try it again, with the goal of writing an app for posting about music I like (because I’m tired of giving that information to Facebook). Grade: hopeful.

Show your work

I’m happy that I’m making more use of my GitHub account, posting four new repositories in the last couple of months. On a related note, I’ve been trying to take the “show your work” mentality to my graduate thesis as much as such things allow through my Argumentation in journalism blog. I’ll turn my thesis in to the university in the next few weeks and soon afterwards post the whole thing to the blog. I’ve also kept the source files inside a Git repository, which I’m thinking about uploading to GitHub as well. Grade: not bad.

Next steps

Python and Django are the big targets on my list, specifically the music app. I might run into some Ruby, too.

Will journalists learn content strategy?

David Herrera,

To help me prepare to relaunch Losses of Life, I re-read Erin Kissane’s book The Elements of Content Strategy. It’s a fine book to get you thinking about content strategy, but it also got me thinking about journalism.

I was struck by how many of the “principles” of content strategy as defined by Kissane are strategies shared by journalists:

  • “Define a clear, specific purpose for each piece of content; evaluate content against this purpose.” Change “content” for “story” and it sounds like every editor who has asked me to “pitch my story.”

  • “Adopt the cognitive frameworks of your users.” Takes me back to editors shortening my ledes, excising my jargon, and, later, making my headlines SEO-friendly.

  • “Mandate consistency, within reason.” Journalists are perhaps hypersensitive about consistent style.

  • “Omit needless content.” This was required reading in editing class.

The point of quoting these principles is that, generally, most journalists should be down with the ends of content strategists.

But that’s the thing. “The aims of content strategists.” Kissane often refers to content strategy as a discipline or position unto itself. “If your content strategist…” does X or Y, and so on.

I don’t have a problem with people being content strategists, but I do wonder about “content strategy” joining a history of “things that are not journalism” and so being ignored by journalists, to no one’s benefit.

To oversimplify a bit, journalists have been isolated over the years from the various parts of what make media machines run. The discipline is only now working to retreat from the notion that journalists need to worry about just “writing news” and not about running a business or programming.

Given this historical dismissal-to-slow-acceptance cycle among journalists toward skills that are important to what they do, there is reason to think content strategy will enter the same pattern, especially as content strategists define themselves as something different from journalists.

The more content strategists differentiate themselves from journalists, the more journalists might feel free to ignore content strategy because it “isn’t journalism.” No one mentioned content strategy to me during my two years as a graduate student at the Missouri School of Journalism, anyway.

So imagine when a news outlet decides to hire a content strategist. What the reaction be when the content strategist starts talking to reporters?

My worry is that the reaction of reporters will be the same resentment and encroachment there would have been if, 15 years ago, management asked the IT department to start running editorial meetings, or 50 years ago asked the business department to begin pitching story ideas.

That conflict is not useful for anybody. Moreover, seeing as journalism and content strategy have similar goals, it will represent a lost opportunity to cooperate, not compete, in pursuit of those goals.

So, will journalists be able to learn just enough about content strategy that they can keep it in-house, as it were? Are there examples of it already happening? Am I wrong to predict conflict between content strategist and journalist?

On GitHub: Make a map with Google Fusion Tables

David Herrera,

Earlier this year I wrestled, tangled, wrangled, and eventually started to learn the Google Fusion Tables API to create Houses of Worship in mid-Missouri, a small application for The Center on Religion & the Professions.

Although the code is ugly, it’s now on GitHub. I would appreciate it if people linked to our version of the map instead of put a new copy on their site, but, either way, anybody looking for code as a starting point for their own mapping projects can have at it.