Okay, so my last few posts have been pretty negative. Sorry, I’ve been grumpy lately. I’ve tried to balance my grumpiness with fun, cool stuff I’ve been reading about in my read feed.

I know my legions of fans don’t click around my site out of fear of and respect for me. So, I’ll just tell you about a neato article I read recently.

MediaShift, one of my favorite blogs in the whole of the blogosphere had a wonderful write up on the 7th about newspapers who hire editorial programmers (editorial say what?):

The big hurdles are pay differential and the culture clash between computer science and journalism. Most programmers — even at the entry level — get paid more than most seasoned journalists. And most editors and journalists have no experience working closely with computer programmers on editorial work. Conversely, programmers aren’t knocking down the doors of newspapers for development jobs, when they can get stock options and more in Silicon Valley-type startup settings.

The article follows the path of well-known J-school programmer Adrian Holovaty, creator of ChicagoCrime.org, and other journo-programmers, through the trials of being programmers and a journalists at the same time.

I’ve learned programmers speak in riddles when you ask them if they’ll finish a project on deadline, they seem to have a God-complex when speaking to non-techies about technical stuff and they rarely, if ever, dress like the professionals they are.

These are all horrible traits for a newsroom setting.

Journalists, on the other hand, want straight answers, generally want to understand what the hell people are talking about in as few words as possible and tend to dress above their means.

These are all horrible traits for a development setting.

Here is a few generalities that programmers and journalism-types can think about to better understand each other, and someday work together more closely:

Math is hard

Journalists tend to hate math. It seems counter-intuitive to what they do with regards to massive heaps of government data some of them sift through, but it’s ingrained in their culture.

At my J-School, there was one class nearly every mass communications student took to fulfill their math requirement: Contemporary Math, meaning, filing out tax forms and balancing checkbooks and figuring out when the next bus will arrive. Hardly calculus. Many (I’m guess most) of my classmates went into journalism, simply to avoid math, not because they’re passionate for the Fourth Estate.

Programmers, though, don’t fear math. They may not like it, but it’s a challenge they’re willing to take.

The fact is, there’s not a ton of math involved in programming for the Web, especially for news Web sites. It’s more like how a musician understands math intuitively, because the nature of his or her job involves thinking in a language with an entirely different syntax than English.

You don’t need to know what the bleep a cosine is, or have a clue what all those funny mathematical shapes mean to talk about the Web. Start with what you know, flat maps or graphs, for example, and work towards ways you’d like to play with the information behind those graphical elements found in newspapers.

Deadlines suck

The news cycle is simple. In any given amount of time, say 24 hours, shit happens. Some of that shit falls under the heading of news because it is information that is, or should be, important to a community.

Once journalists have covered the important shit, they find more shit that is, or should be, important to their community. Yesterday’s shit is mostly forgotten unless it has some relation to tomorrow’s shit.

Deadlines occur because someone in a big office somewhere (probably New York City) decided that newspaper presses have to run sometime late at night to get out to as many people as possible in the mornings. Same goes for TV, where the networks say, “you have X amount of time for your news, or reruns of Andromeda or Wild About Animals and that’s all you get.” That time hole almost never changes.

With the Web, some things are different.

First, there really isn’t a hole. If tomorrow’s shit isn’t ready for publication, yesterday’s shit just hangs out in its place. It’s not like you’ll suddenly hit black for a half an hour after the most riveting episode E.R. ever, or drop a pile of blank pages at doorsteps all around town.

People will come to the site as they please and if they don’t see new information they’ll probably come back later. Probably. Okay, you’d like for them to come back. Fact: the more often you add content to the site in a day, the more often people come back to the site during the day.

See, the Internet is always a work-in-progress. Nothing is really done and put to bed. And nothing really has a deadline. When its ready its ready, when its not, well, that’s where journalists and programmers run into problems.

The key is to start small. A programmer needs time to build the most amazing thing on the Internet and journalists don’t have that time to spare. So, start with little things that will be useful for journalists over and over again. You can always add and modify applications later.

And in the case interactive-fun-pieces, as I like to call them, where the whole application is designed for one story, those applications should be connected to stories with longevity, because it can and will literally just hang out on the Web site forever and eventually surpass those original stories to become a standalone tool for readers.

If it’s a big interactive-fun-piece about yesterdays water commission hearing, at which they didn’t do much that will affect people in the future, the interactive-fun-piece won’t be very fun for very long and you’ve wasted a lot of time making something without traction.

Time is money

Programmers need time to build stuff they haven’t built before. So when you ask them if they can make deadline, and they say they don’t know they probably don’t know, or even if they say it can be done, they still might not be able to, since they have no reference for how long it will take.

This needs to be kept in mind at all times (with any project, really).

With cool, shiny new Web applications, what you see is not all of what you get. There’s all sorts of weird things going on in the background that need to be built and tested.

Web developers do things just like journalists, they start with the raw information they’re given and then turn it into something useful for people. The big difference is that they sometimes have to create the tools they use from scratch (what if a reporter was asked to build a word processor before they could start writing?) or use a kit (use existing code from other projects to piece together a new product). Then, those tools need to be optimized for different browsers (there’s no single type of “paper” on the web, there’s IE, Firefox, Safari and a plethora of other browsers with their own quirks) and sometimes different platforms (browsers vs. cell phone vs. iPod, etc.).

And after all that, it still might turn to a heaping pile of junk. There’s quite a few things that can go wrong from database to browser. The bigger the project, the more things that can go wrong.

I was at a conference were Vint Cerf, one of the “founders of the Internet” said he’s “always surprised when computers work more than zero per cent of the time.” Murphy’s Law must always be remembered.

Again, picking big Web projects wisely means that you can always go back and tweak the application for minor bugs and modifications after the deadline has long since passed. Start small and build up from there as time passes (and as time allows the programmer!).

Those are just words

Many journalists, schooled in Associated Press-style, tend to think in terms of an upside down pyramid when they write. They write that way to tell the most general part of the story first and then get more and more specific until their bosses tell them to stop at the end.

The reason for this is two-fold: One, it helps readers get the gist of it quickly without having to read deep into the article and two, it helps copy editors make room for the article on the page, by allowing them to chop out the crap at the bottom. Efficiencies for everyone!

But with the Web, you can hand out information like candy at Halloween, in yummy, chocolaty bite sizes, full of delicious flavor. Break your story out of linear story telling and use the power of links. Or better yet, don’t even use words to tell your story.

Let’s say a reporter wanted to write a 5-10 inch story on how gas prices are destroying the financial lives of hard-working American citizens. On the Web, you can just ask your programmer and probably a web-savvy designer to build something like this little flash dude at the top of the page here.

Food for thought.

And with that, I’ll shut up for now.

Andy Merrit at The Blog Herald, wonders if this Webomatica post isn’t wishful thinking; Webomatica suggests that reporters start blogging the news, instead of giving us yesterday’s news today.

They’re talking about the newspaper industry’s declining readership and, in particular, these comments from Steven Rattner:

The time that Americans spend reading newspapers has been dropping steadily (now down to 15 hours a month), with scant evidence that quality Internet time is taking its place. In September, the average visitor to newspaper Web sites spent only 41.5 minutes per month on those sites, up 10% from the previous year but not nearly enough to make up the loss.

Rattner argues that Americans care less about the news today than before; particularly younger readers, who seem to get hung up on tabloid news. He suggests, though somewhat indirectly, that this supposed change in reading and viewing habits is forcing newspapers to think differently about what should be considered news.

I think that sentiment couldn’t be further from the truth about what’s going on in the minds of readers. We live in a time where information is fractured, not dumb.

We live in an age where, if I care to, I could read only NASCAR news, or entertainment news, or news about Estonia, if I care to. With the Web, such coverage is as deep as it is wide if you know where to look. Never before could people get such a breadth of information about a single topic.

Magazines understand niche marketing, as do cable TV stations. You pick a topic and build a small audience around that topic, then, you start (or buy) another company geared towards another topic and so on and so forth until you become filthy rich. For some reason or another, newspapers still try to be everything to everybody.

Attention is a zero-sum game. People don’t like wasting their time with something they don’t want. People especially don’t like paying for a whole newspaper when all they want is the funnies. Look at the recording industry, working its way back to the single song model pre-rock operas.

Average visitors to newspaper Web sites only spend 41.5 minutes on those sites because that’s all they need to spend to get what they want.

So, instead of fracturing their products to various niche markets, newspapers, in an effort to reach as many people as possible, have been targeting the lowest common denominator of readers: idiots.

Anna Nichole Smith graced the cover of many local papers, as did Britney Spears, when she shaved her head this past week. In an effort to compete with round-clock-TV “news,” arguments for A1 placement abound. Matt Von Pinnon, editor of The Forum of Fargo-Moorhead writes (registration required, and come Sunday, it’ll be in a pay for archive):

I could hear the groans even before the story hit Tuesday’s front page. “Britney Spears and her latest crazy escapades are not front-page news,” they would say. “Save it for the tabloids,” other readers would write.

Similar sentiments came from our newsroom, sprinkled between ongoing banter about what led one of America’s all-time top pop singers to shave her head after checking in and then quickly out of an off-shore substance abuse treatment center. (This in-and-out sequence would continue all week.)

So why the front page?

Because, admit it, you read it, and you’re talking about it.

Some of my readers will note that I work for the same company as Von Pinnon and I even sit in on the news budget meetings as an online representative. Our company blogging policy states that I can’t talk about work, so we’re going to have to leave it with what Von Pinnon publicly says.

But I’m not sure if Matt’s argument is what’s good for the public. We in journalism have always sat at high and decided what is news and what is not news, but the Internet, and before that, TV news, threw a wrench in our silly operation.

Romenesko gathered a few other sentiments about the whole ordeal:

There’s real news embedded in the ongoing soap operas involving Britney Spears and Anna Nicole Smith, says Eric Deggans. “And a media-weary public needs quality journalists like [NBC News anchor Brian] Williams to pull substance out of these tawdry messes.” || Walker Lundy: “TV went dead-on nuts” over the Anna Nicole story. || Bob Garfield: “Editors are like bartenders, who must serve up what’s ordered provided they know when to say, ‘Sorry, bub, you’ve had enough.’”

So now we’re stuck in the funny situation: do we give people what we think they want or do we give them what we think they need? And will either bring back readers?

If our audience is shrinking, so too should the paper. I’m not saying to cut the news staff and only run bland wire infotainment. There’s still a huge audience that would find it a damn shame if the news completely turned into this mess and dropped its obligation as the Fourth Estate.

I’m saying the papers should diversify with smaller products geared towards smaller, targeted audiences. If they want to survive, they should provide products (such as tabloids and guides) that make money AND products with hard-hitting news that garner peer respect and win pats on the back from colleagues. Instead of having one big business failure, have one little business failure and a few more little business successes.

I’m weary to say that bloggers are here to save us all from the top-down style of news that comes from gray-hairs in New York and Washington, D.C. They’re not. For the most part, bloggers are idiots, too. Sure, there are a few bloggers that fact check and a few traditional journalists that don’t, but that’s not the point.

The point is access. For the most part, bloggers don’t have access to contacts at the Pentagon. They don’t have access to White House press conferences. Bloggers aren’t on the front lines in Iraq.

That’s where newspapers, and to a lesser extent TV, shine. They have decades of experience as organizations dealing with governments, dealing with massive corporations and dealing with corruption and fighting at all levels of human existence.

Bloggers don’t have that kind of organization. At least not yet.

Because of this, I’m also hesitant to say that “crowd wisdom” aggregaters like Google News and Digg are going to solve anything. Google News at any given time can look like USA Today and Digg is full of, well I’ll just come out and say it at my own risk here: crap.

Thoughts?