Mile
Zero

We have sent several people from the newsroom, including myself, to journalism conferences over the last few months. Most conferences are about 50% inspirational and 50% crap (tilted heavily crap-wards in the keynotes), but you meet good people and you get to see the nuts and bolts behind the scenes of some of the best interactive news stories published.

It's natural to come back from a conference with a kind of inferiority complex, and equally easy to conclude that we're not making similar rich presentations because we don't have the cool tools that those other (richer, more tech-savvy) newsrooms have. We too, according to this train of thought, need to be coding elaborate visualization generators and complicated new CMS features — or, as Ryan Pitts from Mozilla said to me last weekend at the Society for News Design workshop, "let's not rest until every paper in the country has built its own charting application."

I think better newsroom tech is important, but let's play devil's advocate for a bit with an unpopular hypothesis: developing tools for the editors and reporters at your newspaper is a waste of your time, and a distraction from the journalism you should be doing.

Why a waste of your time? Partly because newsroom tools get a lot less uptake than you probably think they do (certainly less than we'd hope they would). I've written a lot of internal applications in my time, and they've never been particularly popular, because most reporters and editors don't care. They're too busy doing journalism to use your solution (which is as it should be), and they are probably not big on technology anyway (I have a lot of reporters who can't use Excel, which pains me greatly). Creating tools for reporters is, most of the time, attacking the problem at the wrong point.

For many newsrooms, that wasted time will end up being twice as expensive, because development resources are scarce and UI is hard. Building a polished, feature-filled chart generator that the average journalist can use will take at least a couple of programmer months, which is time those developers aren't working on stories and visualizations that readers want. Are you willing to sacrifice that time, especially if you can't guarantee that it'll actually get used? That's a pretty big gamble, unless you have the resources of the New York Times. You're probably better off just going with an off-the-shelf package, or even finding a simpler solution.

I don't think it's a coincidence that, for all the noise people make about the new data journalism startups like Vox and FiveThirtyEight, 99% of their chart output does not come from a fancy tool or a complex interactive: they post JPEGs. And that's fine! No actual reader has ever complained about having to look at a picture of a graph instead of a souped-up vector rendering (in Vox's case, they're too busy complaining that the graph was stolen from someone else, but that's another story). JPEG is a perfectly decent solution when it comes to simply telling the story across the entire web platform — in fact, it's a great embodiment of "do the simplest thing that works," which has served me well as a guiding motto in life.

So, as a rule of thumb: don't build charting libraries. Don't build general-purpose databases. Don't build drag-and-drop slideshows. Leave these things to other people, who have time and energy to build them for a living. Does this mean you shouldn't create tools at all? No, but the target audience should be you, the news developer, and other semi-technical newsroom staff like the web producers. In other words, make technology for the people who will actually use it, and can handle something that's not polished to a mirror sheen.

I believe this is the big strength of web components, and one reason I'm so bullish on them at the Seattle Times. They're not glossy, end-user products, but they are a great balance between power and accessibility for people with a little technical skill, and they're very fast to build. If the day comes when we do choose to invest in a slicker newsroom app, we can leverage them anyway, the same way that the NYT's fancy chart designers are all based on the developer-oriented D3 library.

In the meanwhile, while I would consider an anti-tool stance a "strong opinion weakly held," I think there's a workable philosophy there. These days, I feel two concerns very strongly (outside of my normal news/editorial production, of course): how to get the newsroom to make use of our skills, and how to best use the limited developer resources we have. A "no tools" guideline is not an absolute rule, but it serves as a useful heuristic to weed out the kinds of projects that might otherwise take over our time.