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Excellent, well written article. The key take away seems to be that instead of an temporary event stream log, since the number of news articles (and associated

by pm90 9y ago

Excellent, well written article. The key take away seems to be that instead of an temporary event stream log, since the number of news articles (and associated assets) is finite and cannot explode, they store all the "logs" forever (I'm using the term log as is defined in the article, as a unit of a time-ordered data structure). I wonder if NYT can help other news websites by making their code open source? I'm a huge fan of NYT and their jump to digital has just been amazing. However, I would also like my local newspaper (which covers more regional news) to be able to serve quality digital content.

dangayle 9y ago
One of the biggest issues is that a lot of newsrooms have zero control over their CMS, because they're owned by a corporate entity that dictates IT decisions from afar, slowly and with much gnashing of teeth. Family-owned papers like the one I work at (The Spokesman-Review in Spokane, WA) are the one of the few news orgs that could actually put something like this into production within this century, but even we still have to deal with manpower issues.
srigi 9y ago
What would be a bigger thing is if they opened access to their monolog.
thinkMOAR 9y ago
It would make me very sad if this would be the case, that every newspaper is going to be running the same kind of software stack. It's then 1 step away from just having only 1 news paper in total. Diversity, choice, innovation, etc up to different reporters reporting on the same story with their point of view, will all disappear if all newspapers are going to run the same software stack.
sync 9y ago
NYT has quite a lot of open source repos: https://github.com/nytimes https://github.com/nytimes
knowtheory 9y ago
> I wonder if NYT can help other news websites by making their code open source? Hey! I, and a number of other news nerds have been encouraging FOSS for the past decade or so. And in fact a number of major open source projects have come out of news related projects, including Django, Backbone.js/Underscore.js, Rich Harris's work on Svelt.js, and a whole lot more. Most often the problem with local news organizations are operational constraints. The news biz has seen a huge downturn over this same period of time. Most orgs, both on the reporting side and on the tech side are super strapped for people-time. It's not enough to have FOSS software, you also have to have folks doing devops and maintaining systems often at below-market salaries.

by pm90 9y ago

dangayle 9y ago

One of the biggest issues is that a lot of newsrooms have zero control over their CMS, because they're owned by a corporate entity that dictates IT decisions from afar, slowly and with much gnashing of teeth. Family-owned papers like the one I work at (The Spokesman-Review in Spokane, WA) are the one of the few news orgs that could actually put something like this into production within this century, but even we still have to deal with manpower issues.

srigi 9y ago

What would be a bigger thing is if they opened access to their monolog.

thinkMOAR 9y ago

It would make me very sad if this would be the case, that every newspaper is going to be running the same kind of software stack. It's then 1 step away from just having only 1 news paper in total. Diversity, choice, innovation, etc up to different reporters reporting on the same story with their point of view, will all disappear if all newspapers are going to run the same software stack.

sync 9y ago

NYT has quite a lot of open source repos: https://github.com/nytimes https://github.com/nytimes

knowtheory 9y ago

> I wonder if NYT can help other news websites by making their code open source? Hey! I, and a number of other news nerds have been encouraging FOSS for the past decade or so. And in fact a number of major open source projects have come out of news related projects, including Django, Backbone.js/Underscore.js, Rich Harris's work on Svelt.js, and a whole lot more. Most often the problem with local news organizations are operational constraints. The news biz has seen a huge downturn over this same period of time. Most orgs, both on the reporting side and on the tech side are super strapped for people-time. It's not enough to have FOSS software, you also have to have folks doing devops and maintaining systems often at below-market salaries.