

Why Journalism Tools Gather Dust - slifty
http://slifty.com/2012/12/why-journalism-tools-gather-dust/

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WillItWork
Slifty:

Here's the thing—everyone, in every enterprise-level business has deadlines.
In news media, there is confusion over auteurship and who drives production.
It's similar to music business and movies.

As a result, the businesses while have their entire existence dependent upon
control of market are very reluctant to disruptively innovate.

I think, if there was a new media professional journalism school or movement,
this would be less of an issue. The more I think about it, we're looking at
similar to what Hollywood did before the rise of film school
directors—personal control requires control of tools.

In media in general, presentation is a necessary part of identity. Branding is
key. Therefore, the tools that create that are frightening to distribute. Good
tools, as you know are build from the ground up over time, with both en eye
towards future development providing foundation and current need and
relentless opposition providing shape.

The Times is pretty progressive, but they're in the seat of Microsoft or
Apple—the company can create a standard, but there's little pressure to
embrace it.

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arscan
This isn't something that only happens in your industry -- you'll see it in
most sufficiently large enterprises. Effective software reuse, while certainly
a noble goal, is very hard to accomplish.

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slifty
I did assume as much. I'm curious, since so many in J-orgs are trying to
change the status quo, if there are success stories that are worth paying
attention to.

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hayksaakian
the dust is spreading from the journals to their tools ;)

~~~
WillItWork
It's not dust, it's the emergence. Journalism as an occupation is a required
aspect of liberty. Journalism as a business is essentially reactive and has
not successfully shifted in monetizing new media. Until it does, it will stay
stuck in old patterns.

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DrDreams
I can tell you now that I've been out of grad school for around a year or so:

Many companies are not product-focused. The goal of producing a good product
using sensible techniques is only a small part of what happens. Companies are
mainly social relations, specifically fiefdoms. At the top of the social
hierarchy is an organization which can produce a "good enough" product to earn
an income to keep the company afloat, while supporting the back-stabbing that
goes on at the high levels.

Competing viciously for those dollars are hundreds of individuals. Their work
is optimal when they bring the company, the commons, or the social fabric
nearest to the brink of destruction. These people really don't care about
sharing. If a company is not doing well, it doesn't make sense to them to
utilize new techniques (such as sharing software) to make it better. They
would rather loot the company and move on.

This is especially true of companies which have reached maturation separately,
then been artificially bonded, such as the two newspapers you mention. From
the outside, they may appear as two large pools of positively-charged
molecules and you're wondering why the negatively-charged (connotations not
implied here) molecules of software don't simply attract and stick. The reason
is that the companies are not uniform entities... They're deeply complex
structures with all kinds of spikes, moats, alarms, etc. to keep foreign
entities, such as uncertainty and loss of control - away.

It doesn't matter if that friendly visitor coming to their door is a good
Samaritan who wants to give out free cookies and teach them how to make
cookies more efficiently or more deliciously. They already have reliable ways
to make enough money and any newcomer is only going to disrupt how that flows.
To make _more_ money, they prefer social means, not technical ones. Why mess
with - or even consider - software and other work when you can hire, fire and
deceive people through antisocial practices of marketing, human resources, the
stock market, etc.? Software is too wild - anyone (even teenagers for
crissake) can write it and it's too powerful. So don't stake the business on
software, stake it on social relations.

If your goal is to make a better product, find a better system of social
relations. If you want to make your technological solution work, appeal to the
antisocial tendencies in the hierarchy.

