Innovative media needs better technology

#media - #startup - #cms - #wiki - #cards

Apr 6, 2014 - NY Times - Vox Takes Melding of Journalism and Technology to a New Level

Ask Ezra Klein what prompted him to leave a high-profile position at The Washington Post to start a new website, and the answer is a little wonkish.

It was, in essence, about content management systems, Mr. Klein said.

“We were badly held back not just by the technology, but by the culture of journalism,”

he said of daily newspapers, as he offered a preview of his new site, Vox.com, which was introduced Sunday night.

While The Post is an excellent publication, he said, he felt that the conventions of newspaper print journalism in general, with its commitment to incremental daily coverage, were reflected in publishing systems, which need first and foremost to meet the needs of printing a daily paper.

That end of that last sentence is baffling in 2014.

My February 2014 thought

Producing a printed newspaper wastes money and slows innovation. If an old newspaper company feels the need to produce a printed product to "serve" the public, then that company should spin-off a small group of writers, editors, designers, and other tech people, and give the group its own company name and budget, and allow them to operate like a startup, creating new products for producing and sharing journalism. If successful, then eventually, the old wing of the company transitions completely to the new. If it fails, well, at least they tried.

Back to the Apr 6, 2014 NY Times story:

So in January, when he and his colleagues announced they would join Vox Media with the aim of creating a site bigger and broader than Wonkblog, it seemed to be another watershed in the news business: a moment when young talent began demanding superior technology as the key to producing superior journalism.

With printing to paper either a non-existent thought or a significant afterthought.

Technology has become crucial to every newsroom, of course, but not all technology has been designed equally. News organizations born in the print era have generally knit together disparate systems over the years to produce websites that integrate graphics, social media and reader comments with various degrees of smoothness.

Many all-digital organizations have built their content management systems from the ground up with the Internet in mind. That strategy, many say, produces a more organic melding of journalism and technology.

A little about Vox Media's CMS:

In this high-tech universe, Vox Media’s content management system — which even has its own name, Chorus, and is used to publish all the company’s websites — has earned recognition. It is credited with having a toolset that allows journalists to edit and illustrate their copy in dramatic fashion, promote their work on social media, and interact with readers — all seamlessly and intuitively.

Reporters and multimedia journalists say the enhanced technology of Chorus enables them to do things like make photos appear as a cursor slides down a page; add links automatically to copy; and identify problem commentators through word identification.

“Most journalists hate their content management systems,”

said Melissa Bell, who was director of platforms at The Post before she left with Mr. Klein to join Vox.

Chorus does not fix everything, of course, said Jim Bankoff, Vox Media’s ambitious chief executive, but it is sexy enough to be a recruiting tool. “For this generation of talent, which grew up digitally, having the proper tools to ply their craft is essential,” he said in a recent interview. “Being able to offer them the best possible platform to achieve their goals is a great advantage.”

Like Mr. Klein, the founders of all those sites confirmed that Chorus was crucial to their decision to team with Vox. Josh Topolsky, editor in chief of The Verge, came over in 2011 after growing frustrated with the limits of the computer system at Engadget, an AOL technology publication.

“From a storytelling perspective it couldn’t be accomplished in any other place that I have seen.” - [Josh Topolsky]

The company’s attitude toward content management has its roots in the basement of Trei Brundrett, now Vox’s chief product officer. It was there that he and some partners developed SB Nation, a sports blogging website that became wildly popular when it was introduced nine years ago.

Mr. Brundrett and his crew cast themselves as equal parts journalists and software developers.

Because SB Nation needed a platform where sports fans could communicate with one another, the team created word-recognition software that would help police comments. Because it covered live sports events, it created an organizational tool, called story stream, that allowed editors to click and drag relevant material — from previous stories, Twitter posts or commentary by the writers — all into one continuous flow.

Developers at Vox Media call themselves journalists and work continually with writers and reporters to build the tools they require.

Mr. Klein, hoping to avoid incrementalism — “the biggest source of waste is everything the journalist has written before today,” he said — instead wants his journalists responsible for constantly updating pages that are the ultimate resource on a topic.

“It would be like a wiki page written by one person with a little attitude,”

Ms. Bell explained.

To help accomplish this, the developers have been building a tool they call the card stack. The cards, trimmed in brilliant canary yellow, contain definitions of essential terms that a reader can turn to if they require more context.

For example, a story updating the battle over the Affordable Care Act might include cards explaining the term “insurance exchange.”

Ms. Bell said Vox.com would start with roughly 20 reporters with expertise around specific topics, a limited travel budget, and, of course, very inchoate¹ technology.

A bit more about Vox in general:

[Vox's] largest demographic is educated households headed by individuals under 35 years old with incomes over $100,000.

Perhaps more important for its long-term survival, Vox’s formats attract attention directly, so the site does not have to turn to gimmicky features like quizzes, teasing headlines or lists to generate traffic through Facebook or Twitter.

For a while now, I've been interested in new media startups led by Greenwald, Silver, and Klein. All three approach journalism differently. I looked forward to Silver's data-backed, logically-focused stories. And

¹ in·cho·ate - adjective - "just begun and so not fully formed or developed." - syn: rudimentary, undeveloped, immature, embryonic, fledgling.