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How much time does it take for NYT to make these interactive stories? (pure technology not data collection or field journalism) If it's not significant then th

by dm8 13y ago

How much time does it take for NYT to make these interactive stories? (pure technology not data collection or field journalism) If it's not significant then this is certainly future of journalism. [EDIT]: Looking at couple of interactive stories in recent past (Snow Fall and New Silk Road) looks like this is something they want to repeat again and again. Do you think they've developed some sort of framework (like Django/Rails) ?

jeffpersonified 13y ago
I'm particularly curious what they're using these interactive stories for. Refining design or technique? Gauging user interest? Putting processes into place to speed up their development? Really impressed either way.
- kcorbitt 13y ago
  Keeping people from getting the whole experience on something like Pocket or Flipboard. Not that I blame them; it's a good idea.
- ssully 13y ago
  It's most likely all of that. They seem to be testing the waters on what written journalism means in the 21st century, and I think it's great. The Rolling Stone recently did an article[1] that I otherwise would have ignored(due to my distaste for their material), but ended up reading because of the fantastic presentation. I don't know if this trend will stick, or how it will evolve, but it is certainly an interesting spin at modernizing these features. [1]- http://www.rollingstone.com/feature/the-geeks-on-the-frontlines#i.c7ydtg2vgdx1s3 http://www.rollingstone.com/feature/the-geeks-on-the-frontli...
ubernostrum 13y ago
I do not work for the NYT. I did, once upon a time, work for a news organization that was considered to be innovative with respect to using technology to further the presentation of journalism. One of the things I worked on was a generic framework for "composite" stories -- that is, a collection of not just text and photos, but integrated presentations of text, audio/video, photos and data visualizations, with customizable templating to lay it all out and organize for the web. Time and link rot have not been kind to the things that were done with that. For example, the data bits of this: http://www2.ljworld.com/news/mining/ http://www2.ljworld.com/news/mining/ no longer function, and it certainly shows its age, design-wise. But that was where we were in early 2007, technology-wise, and it was built with a hacked-together-in-a-week proof of concept of the underlying framework. What we had at the time shipped with some standard out-of-the-box templates for presenting a story, and for one-off stories we could also task someone to work on creating new ones which could be slotted in for use. When new templating work wasn't required, they could put together a composite story presentation in a matter of hours, once they had all the materials they wanted. The next evolution of that, which I was pushing for toward the end of my tenure there but never got to complete, would have been integrated data processing and visualization tools, allowing journalists to toss various sources (my rough draft worked with spreadsheets, since those were a pretty common source) into a denormalized data store, scrub a bit, and generate useful presentations from them. While I can't be sure, I strongly suspect that the NYT has done something similar, developing the underlying framework for tying together a bunch of content in an attractive way, and probably building some tools to simplify and speed up the generation of the data presentations. What they're doing here, and have done a couple other times, seems well within reach for someone who knows what they're doing and has access to six years' worth of advances in technology. (anecdotally, I've heard that the NYT special projects are done in Rails; ours were done in Django since it was originally our in-house web framework, but in either case it's a strong argument for the productivity gains of those web frameworks) Edit: FWIW, here are slides from a lightning talk I gave at PyCon in 2008, about a data-driven project and the timeline involved in it: http://media.b-list.org/presentations/2008/pycon/lightning.pdf http://media.b-list.org/presentations/2008/pycon/lightning.p... Sadly, the story itself is no longer functioning. Here's one that's actually miraculously still online, from the fall/winter a few years back when everyone was worried about swine flu: http://www2.ljworld.com/data/flu/ http://www2.ljworld.com/data/flu/ The core of that was put together very quickly, and then it was about an hour's work each week to update with the latest data coming in.
jacobolus 13y ago
Note it’s Mike Bostock et al. putting these together on the tech side. They’re probably getting pretty quick at it by now. http://bost.ocks.org/mike/ http://bost.ocks.org/mike/

by dm8 13y ago

jeffpersonified 13y ago

I'm particularly curious what they're using these interactive stories for. Refining design or technique? Gauging user interest? Putting processes into place to speed up their development? Really impressed either way.

kcorbitt 13y ago
Keeping people from getting the whole experience on something like Pocket or Flipboard. Not that I blame them; it's a good idea.
ssully 13y ago
It's most likely all of that. They seem to be testing the waters on what written journalism means in the 21st century, and I think it's great. The Rolling Stone recently did an article[1] that I otherwise would have ignored(due to my distaste for their material), but ended up reading because of the fantastic presentation. I don't know if this trend will stick, or how it will evolve, but it is certainly an interesting spin at modernizing these features. [1]- http://www.rollingstone.com/feature/the-geeks-on-the-frontlines#i.c7ydtg2vgdx1s3 http://www.rollingstone.com/feature/the-geeks-on-the-frontli...

ubernostrum 13y ago

I do not work for the NYT. I did, once upon a time, work for a news organization that was considered to be innovative with respect to using technology to further the presentation of journalism. One of the things I worked on was a generic framework for "composite" stories -- that is, a collection of not just text and photos, but integrated presentations of text, audio/video, photos and data visualizations, with customizable templating to lay it all out and organize for the web. Time and link rot have not been kind to the things that were done with that. For example, the data bits of this: http://www2.ljworld.com/news/mining/ http://www2.ljworld.com/news/mining/ no longer function, and it certainly shows its age, design-wise. But that was where we were in early 2007, technology-wise, and it was built with a hacked-together-in-a-week proof of concept of the underlying framework. What we had at the time shipped with some standard out-of-the-box templates for presenting a story, and for one-off stories we could also task someone to work on creating new ones which could be slotted in for use. When new templating work wasn't required, they could put together a composite story presentation in a matter of hours, once they had all the materials they wanted. The next evolution of that, which I was pushing for toward the end of my tenure there but never got to complete, would have been integrated data processing and visualization tools, allowing journalists to toss various sources (my rough draft worked with spreadsheets, since those were a pretty common source) into a denormalized data store, scrub a bit, and generate useful presentations from them. While I can't be sure, I strongly suspect that the NYT has done something similar, developing the underlying framework for tying together a bunch of content in an attractive way, and probably building some tools to simplify and speed up the generation of the data presentations. What they're doing here, and have done a couple other times, seems well within reach for someone who knows what they're doing and has access to six years' worth of advances in technology. (anecdotally, I've heard that the NYT special projects are done in Rails; ours were done in Django since it was originally our in-house web framework, but in either case it's a strong argument for the productivity gains of those web frameworks) Edit: FWIW, here are slides from a lightning talk I gave at PyCon in 2008, about a data-driven project and the timeline involved in it: http://media.b-list.org/presentations/2008/pycon/lightning.pdf http://media.b-list.org/presentations/2008/pycon/lightning.p... Sadly, the story itself is no longer functioning. Here's one that's actually miraculously still online, from the fall/winter a few years back when everyone was worried about swine flu: http://www2.ljworld.com/data/flu/ http://www2.ljworld.com/data/flu/ The core of that was put together very quickly, and then it was about an hour's work each week to update with the latest data coming in.

jacobolus 13y ago

Note it’s Mike Bostock et al. putting these together on the tech side. They’re probably getting pretty quick at it by now. http://bost.ocks.org/mike/ http://bost.ocks.org/mike/