
How can a programmer help The New York Times report stories? - jashkenas
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/jobs/nyt-news-applications-developer.html
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tptacek
The irony of this is that it's March 1, and there's a hiring thread on the
site today, which is where stuff like this belongs.

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jashkenas
Sorry about that — I think I posted it a few minutes before the hiring thread
went up (or at least, a couple hours before I noticed it).

I wasn't really expecting this listing to reach the front page — but I can
understand that it did.

There's been so much energy / handwringing / chatter in recent months about
our increasingly post-factual era, governments' relationships with journalism,
and possible technical remedies, that I thought this new team (which has some
very sharp people on it) might strike a chord here.

~~~
taylorbuley
Heads up that the mailbot is throwing out responses saying there's no jobs
available. Because this was posted today, I'm sure if that means there are no
longer any jobs available or the responder just hasn't been updated.

> Thank you for your interest in Interactive News. We do not have open
> positions at this time but we would like to stay in contact with you as our
> hiring needs evolve.

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jashkenas
Thanks for the headsup — I'll let them know.

 _Edit:_ Bowers says that he's fixed it now.

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vinhboy
I want to join the NYTimes and build a "chronicle" feature. I hate how news
stories develop overtime, but there is nothing to "chronicle" the story from
beginning to end.

Linking to related stories is a temporary fix, but a standard timeline would
be better. It should even motivate people to contribute to "follow-ups" on
stories. Report what happened to the affected parties, where are they now,
etc...

This is in the interest of keeping people informed and engaged. Instead of
endlessly chasing "breaking news"

Take the "Oroville Dam" story for example. I would love to be able to
subscribe to a timeline of updates as more unfold. A year from now, will there
be a story about how the dam was fixed? How government money was spent? etc...

Or whatever happened to those girls who were locked in that guy's basement?
Whatever happened to them? Where are they now?

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larubbio
I had a similar idea, but wanted to build it outside of a single news
organisation. Basically a news aggregator, but it would detect when different
articles are about the same topic and try to tell if the newer article added
anything to the story. This aggregation system would then track public
interest in a story over time (based on clicks) along with media interest
(based on new stories)

I also wanted to add in user, publication and reporter 'leanings' by having a
mechanism where users could say that they thought a story was
left/right/neutral. The act of voting would count as a push having the affect
of slightly moving the publication and reporter in one direction and the voter
in another. I would then use an ELO type metric so a user who was very far in
one direction wouldn't have the same impact as a user more in the center.

~~~
vinhboy
That's actually awesome. There is a lot of stigma around "duplicate" posts.
But I think in the context of showing different angles of the same story, that
would be cool.

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mcculley
Yes! There is a need for more people in journalism who understand the
principles of data relationships and are comfortable with modern technology.
Whoever takes this job or one at another newspaper, here's a subset of my
desiderata for modern journalists:

Every article should have machine readable metadata including:

* The author

* The geographic and political point(s) or region(s) discussed in the article

* URLs of related content (serious news outlets need to fight their desire to keep the user from leaving the site)

* A boolean that indicates if the article uses anonymous sources (tools could then filter out such articles when desired)

* Implicit version control showing each published revision of an article and who made the change

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untog
These are all desirable, but IMO also really miss the point.

Jobs like this are about the _input_ of a story, not the output. Ensuring that
a health story is backed up by thorough analysis of government data. Or a
story created entirely from scratch because a bot noticed an uptick in some
particular dataset.

That has the potential to be really powerful journalism. Metadata isn't
unimportant, but it's not more important than the story itself.

(IIRC, the NYT already has APIs that fulfill almost all of your requests,
incidentally)

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mcculley
> Jobs like this are about the input of a story, not the output.

> Metadata isn't unimportant, but it's not more important than the story
> itself.

I see redefining what a modern reader should expect of serious journalism as a
forcing function that would prompt the writer/editor to provide that data. It
would affect how they report and provide better input.

~~~
untog
I agree, but I wouldn't expect to see news orgs provide this data until
readers actually do demand it. Most are (slowly) going out of business, so
they're not about to spend very expensive developer resources on features few
people are asking for.

~~~
mcculley
Unfortunately, I think you are correct. No newspaper is likely to invest in
raising the bar and I'm in a small minority that wants these features. I fear
that all providers of serious journalism will keep chasing advertising revenue
instead of serving readers.

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passivepinetree
This is pretty cool, actually. It's neat to see a prominent company

* actively advertising open source contributions

* not requiring endless whiteboarding sessions

* wanting to review past projects as a large part of the interview

~~~
wildpeaks
I recall the creator of the open source library D3.js also used to work there
and did a lot great interactive pieces for articles.

Their open source blog is also quite interesting:
[https://open.blogs.nytimes.com](https://open.blogs.nytimes.com)

~~~
jashkenas
He certainly did: [https://www.nytimes.com/by/mike-
bostock](https://www.nytimes.com/by/mike-bostock)

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jashkenas
If folks have questions — feel free to ask in here. I'm sure we can lean on
@jeremybowers (whose job opening it is) to swing by and answer some...

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chis
Any interest in hiring interns?

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jashkenas
Definitely. Usually in the summertime.

[http://www.nytco.com/careers/newsroom-summer-
internships/](http://www.nytco.com/careers/newsroom-summer-internships/)

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tbirrell
First question. What languages are in use? Because I know LAMP, but this might
be on Microsoft or MEAN. In which case I'll have found and cleaned up 3
projects and a resume for no reason. All the information needs to be presented
upfront, I don't want to have to go looking for it.

~~~
jashkenas
I believe it's somewhat flexible — as this post is for a new, small team
(within Interactive News). So there's not necessarily a big existing codebase
to maintain, and they're going to be working on some greenfield reporting
tools.

That said, we use a lot of JavaScript, a fair amount of R, a medium amount of
Ruby, some Python, and occasionally Go. Stats skills are a plus, as are
database skills, as are design chops.

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TuringNYC
I realize this does not answer the question, but I'd suggest helping
ProPublica. They even have a GitHub acct w/ assets!
[https://github.com/propublica](https://github.com/propublica)

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suneilp
What does "You know how to meet deadlines creatively and collaboratively."
mean? Mostly the creatively part is what piqued my interest.

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jashkenas
To hazard a response, meeting a deadline creatively is knowing how best to
trim, tweak and reimagine your concept to get in done in time.

One of the most fun and different aspects about writing code in a newsroom is
the _extremely_ different timescales that are involved compared to normal
programming.

If you think it sounds like fun to sit down in front of a blank page of HTML
with a fresh government dataset, RStudio, a copy of D3, a cup of coffee and 36
hours to see how good of an exploration and explanation you can come up with,
this might be the job for you.

~~~
jeremyjbowers
This is absolutely correct.

