Zac Echola is muffin but trouble

Do it: Code on deadline (or how I learned to program without actually programming)

Published on 05/04/07
by Zac Echola

Google Maps released a new feature Thursday, My Maps. The service lets you draw lines and shapes over the Google maps, add markers, add whatever HTML you want to the marker bubbles and then you can spit out into a KML file. You can then dump the
KML data into Google Earth or another Google Map for your Web site, with a little knowledge of the Google Map API.

My Maps makes drawing on a map dead easy, and as soon as Google adds features to let you easily geo-code tabular data and then embed My Maps into your Web site, it will be the killer map app for Web journalists.

This got me thinking about a few things.

First, programmers that understand journalism, and journalists that understand programming are few and far between, which causes a problem for news outlets looking to expand their Web operations.

Second, I’ve said it before, programming takes time and it’s never a finished product, which causes a fundamental problem for those who work on tight deadlines.

Lastly, where does the value of information lie for news gatherers?

First things first: Journo-programming

Ask a programmer to make something by a certain time and they’ll tell you it can be done. Eternal optimists, most of them, they often don’t know how long something will take to build. Building to a quality standard journalists need might not be an option on a Friday afternoon whim for an 12 p.m. deadline Sunday.

That’s a fact of life behind a computer.

The developers I work with like to ask “why build something new, when it has already been done?” They “steal” code from each other frequently, but they make a point on a grander scale.

Page designers don’t change their styles every week and they certainly don’t create their own fonts. So why should programmers start from scratch with every product?

The Internet does two things well: It organizes and displays data and it creates efficiencies.

When creating something that will only be used once or a few times by the news, why build it all from scratch if you don’t need to?

Time wasters

Obviously building something new and populating it with data takes longer than populating something already created with data.

There are hundreds–thousands even–of Web products out there. Many of them can be leveraged, for free, to suit journalistic needs without having to build the product from the ground up.

Check out the Bakersfield site. Their map section isn’t built from coders manipulating the Google API. They’re leveraging sites like Zeemaps and Quikmaps to quickly create their maps. They even use YouTube for video on occasion.

They hand over the information they gather to these services and in turn, basically wrap their sites around the embed codes or iframes the services kick out.

Which brings us to:

The catch

Just what the crunk is the value of journalism? Is controlling the final product and copyright or the actual news gathering process more important?

I’m starting to lean more towards the latter. Data is usually freely available to anyone with the motivation (or gall) to ask for it.

Journalists basically just gather information, parse it and put it in a relevant context for their readers. That’s why we read newspapers. That’s why we watch the 6 p.m. news. We’re not particularly interested in the fact that you control the information you gather. We care about the context and relevance of said information.

Traditional media has this weird fascination with controlling the information it gathers. News gathering organizations rarely offer full-text RSS feeds for this reason. They want eyeballs on their sites; Withholding all the information from your feed reader gives them some semblance of control.

So handing over data to third parties drives news business people up the wall. They see it as giving their property away.

I’d argue that information is hardly the property of news media. Their value is the context and analysis of the information. Many YouTube videos are pointless. Clicking around the site, many Zeemaps don’t make much sense either. But that’s because you’re not seeing them in the context of their creation. They are created with the mindset that context will be divvied somewhere else.

Sure, there’s the greater catch that third party Web services often fall by the wayside, which can hurt the value of archived news behind pay walls. I don’t think its enough of a problem, though, considering the money saved from having developers work more on projects with higher returns on investment than news.

News has a terribly short shelf life to spend working on projects that peak in views in a day or two.

The end. Or is it?

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