

How the New York Times Works - Thevet
http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/a14030/how-the-new-york-times-works/

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jashkenas
If all you rascals have any questions — feel free to ask. The "militaristic
fervor" isn't quite yet in effect here this early in the morning...

~~~
danso
1\. Has the NYT dev team started moving more towards Go? Or towards JS/Node.
Or Python? Or is there no consensus (nor any need for one)?

2\. What's Maureen Dowd's opinion on CoffeeScript vs JavaScript?

~~~
jashkenas
1\. There are many different teams of "devs" that each do their own thing ...
but as far as I'm aware — The main site is still mostly PHP and Java, with
perhaps a bit of Node and Go here and there. The iOS folks, are naturally
Objective-C, and the Android folks are Java. Interactive News is Rails and
Node, with a touch of Haskell whenever Hinton throws it in the mix ;) Graphics
is as static as possible, with Node tools for pre-building and pre-baking.

2\. As you can read for yourself here:
[http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/04/opinion/dowd-dont-harsh-
ou...](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/04/opinion/dowd-dont-harsh-our-mellow-
dude.html) ... Maureen Dowd is clearly down with groovy, far-out technologies
of the mind-expanding sort.

------
dcole2929
I strongly considered going the route of journalist-developer after graduation
but couldn't really get any information. Seemed like all the opportunities
were with Buzzfeed and their ilk and while they may occasionally flirt with
good journalism overall I'd rather work for BigCorp. Still I think I'd love to
do this kind of work. Anyone have details about pay or places hiring?

~~~
showerst
NYT is the big guy in the space but there's actually a lot of action right
now, with the Post, Vox, and some big traditional organizations like AP
doubling down on it over the past few years.

Pay is generally in the 'low for a professional developer but reasonable'
zone. The hours and work environments tend to be rough, as the news makes its
own hours and the media industry in general doesn't have the experience with
good project/product management that you'd expect at a tech company. On the
other hand the work is super cool, and it's always fun to see your projects
exposed to millions of people. There's also a very guerrilla spirit among the
journo tech people that I've met that's really fun to be around. As projects
are often time-sensitive one-offs, there's also a lot more experimentation
with new tech than you'll find elsewhere.

If you're interested in the field look at the stuff Nicar and the Knight
Foundation do, and look to see if your town has a local hackshackers meetup
group.

~~~
dcole2929
I'm definitely going to look into this now. I did some work for a journalism
class that was funded by the Knight Foundation so not sure why it never
occurred to me to look into them further. Thanks

~~~
showerst
No prob. Not sure what your exact skills are but anybody with even basic data
scraping/munging/analysis skills, and any data visualization stuff (especially
d3 knowledge) is super employable valuable right now.

There probably aren't that many spots in raw numbers, but I think the right
candidate wouldn't have too hard a time getting picked up somewhere.

------
mattdotc
The author [necessarily] glazed over the more interesting features of the
building:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_York_Times_Building#Sus...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_York_Times_Building#Sustainability)

~~~
justinph
Not mentioned in the wikipedia article: There are no trash cans in the
lunchroom because Renzo Piano apparently hates them. Instead, weird conveyer
belt tray thing.

~~~
mattdotc
I agree with him, to be honest...especially in a lunch room. They get grimy
unless the staff is meticulous about keeping them clean and they have to be
constantly monitored so that they don't get over-filled. Also, changing the
bags is unsightly, especially when people are eating nearby.

This is just scratching the surface of all the potential arguments against
them.

------
hackuser
I read the NYT daily (via RSS feeds). It is an important institution for the
U.S. and the world; the options are rapidly shrinking for high-quality
journalism and so I worry about the Times' future. From my perspective the
Times' content is invaluable, but in 2015 the Times is hurting itself because
it still hasn't embraced the web. www.nytimes.com is still a news _paper_ 's
website, not a news website. When I'm looking for news in my browser, I don't
care that you have a paper edition, I only care which website serves me best.

\--------

1) Design: Look at the homepage. If someone was asked to design a new news
(not a newspaper) website, who would design it like that? Rather than a news
website it looks like a newspaper on the web, seemingly trying to mimic the
layout of a newspaper's pages. (It's not just the Times -- often it's easy to
identify news websites with a newspaper legacy.) From the perspective of
people familiar with the Times on paper, it might seem familiar; but get
outside that bubble and it's archaic and a bit bizarre.[1]

Also, it hides so much content; why put all that talent and effort into work
product that you show only to a few? My NYT RSS feeds look like a different,
far richer publication than
[http://www.nytimes.com/](http://www.nytimes.com/). Again, it seems like
attachment to the legacy newspaper design, where people can't easily pick up
another publication and so will flip through Times' pages and sections looking
for something interesting. The overall structure is a newspaper's sections
forced into a website's medium.

\--------

2) Multimedia is still secondary: Articles still are primarily text, but now
more often with video and image bolted on almost as decoration, and not an
integral part of the content, equal to the text. See today's article on Tomi
Ungerer[2], chosen at random. This is about a visual artist, and it actually
has several images within the text, rather than on top or in a pop-out, but
the images are merely decorative. The author doesn't write, 'look at this
drawing; see the use of color, the ironic shapes, etc.' and look at this
detail <img: zoomed-in detail> where Mr. Ungerer uses X to do Y' It's almost
as if the the author wrote the article and someone else picked some relevant
decorations later.

There's even a link in prime real estate, just beneath the banner, to "Video",
as if I choose my news based on whether it's in text or video. As if you are
saying, 'our actual news is below, and video is something we do over here'. I
just want the news; I trust you to choose the best mix of mediums to
communicate that particular story.

The solution is well known: Most amateur bloggers are equally fluent in text
and multimedia; rather than describing something they write 'look at this' or
'here's what happened' or 'here is the before and after' and, in the middle of
their post place a video, image, or short loop as appropriate. Hundreds of
millions of phone users fluently communicate with images and photos. But the
talented, professional communicators at the Times stick primarily to text, I
suppose because that's what they did on paper.

I'm not looking for graphic excitement; they are just communication tools and
sometimes multimedia is the right tool, sometimes text is; the Times seems to
choose its tools based on paper's limitations (i.e., text is cheap, images
expensive in both space and $, video impossible) and not what communicates
best on the web (where all are cheap and space is unlimited).

\---------

3) Updates and the news cycle: Two things I still see in the Times: A)
'Updated at 4:55pm'. If I read the article at 3:00pm, that isn't very helpful;
should I re-read the entire thing and try to figure out what changed? Run a
diff? Again, the solutions are well known and most bloggers handle this
situation effectively; the Times still seems to be designing newspaper
articles that will be published and read once. B) When you do have someone
blogging a breaking news story, sometimes I'll see 'That's it for tonight,
I'll be back at 8am tomorrow'. I don't have to explain the problems with that,
though I'll add that the news and your readers are in time zones worldwide.

\---------

[1] This will be shocking to say but I'm trying to make a point about how far
the Times is, conceptually, from the web medium: Consider the most recognized
branding element, the detailed, archaic font used for "The New York Times", in
the banner. In the days of newspapers, when readers could only type in Courier
if at all, the font was special. It said, 'this was printed professionally,
with skill and seriousness'. Now kids can print fonts like that on their
school papers, anyone can do it on their WordPress blog, and when they do it's
frowned upon. Now that element says, 'not a digital native, stuck in our
glorious past'. Again, it's hard to imagine a newly created news website
making that design decision. You may have a strong attachment to that design
element, but billions of web users don't care. (I know branding is difficult
to change; I expect the font will remain.)

[2] [http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/13/arts/design/review-tomi-
un...](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/13/arts/design/review-tomi-ungerer-bad-
boy-of-art-in-a-reappraisal.html)

~~~
vonnik
Former NYT journalist here.

You make some really good points. The NYT is trying hard to embrace the Web,
and it's done a better job than a lot of newspapers, but it faces certain
limitations.

That said, a lot of the activity in the newsroom is still tied to the daily
rhythm of putting out newspapers.

Digital ad revenue only accounts for about 30% of the paper's total ad
revenue, which means that print still figures large:

[http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/243057/nytco-t...](http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/243057/nytco-
treads-water-digital-ad-revenues-up.html)

While the NYT's profit declined by about 40% from 2013 to 2014, from $156M to
$92M, it is still a profitable company, and much of that profit comes from
print. It's very hard for a company to wean itself from a profit center,
especially when it's not clear how profitable it will be on the digital side.

[http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/04/business/new-york-times-
co...](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/04/business/new-york-times-
company-q4-earnings.html)

