

The newsonomics of “Little Data,” data scientists, and conversion specialists - a5seo
http://www.niemanlab.org/2013/10/the-newsonomics-of-little-data-data-scientists-and-conversion-specialists/

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asciimo
This headline made me chuckle. One of my biggest disappointments while working
at NYT Digital in the late 00s was that there were so many engineers. To
organize them all, technologies and staff were piled into silos (eg the
database team, the platform team, the frontend team), requiring painfully
complicated communication for significant projects. Things moved very slowly
there.

It was so bad that my department director jokingly recommended hastening a
small, public-facing project by using Google Spreadsheets as a datastore,
rather than deal with the overhead of involving the database team. I took his
advice at face value and shipped the app quickly. He grinned, and said in a
congratulatory tone, "you actually used Google Spreadsheets!" It was like a
subversive victory.

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saosebastiao
This is also the origin of millions of buggy-VBA stuffed Excel spreadsheets
that are running tons of fortune 500 companies.

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normloman
Fat chance. If the NYTimes had hired more engineers, those engineers would
have told management they needed to innovate to survive, just like everyone
else was telling them. And management still wouldn't have listened.

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brown9-2
Don't you think every single employee at NYTimes Co knows that?

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larrydag
Not really. I believe there is still a big divide between the content
providers and the content distributors. Most dinosaur publications are not
innovating enough to keep up with new media. One reason why Bezos bought Wash
Post.

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Dirlewanger
What a surprise: a media dinosaur dismissing new technologies before it was
too late.

Also, how about appropriately titling the link instead of paraphrasing the
opening line?

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bostonpete
I hope you're not suggesting that "The newsonomics of “Little Data,” data
scientists, and conversion specialists" would be a better submission title...

~~~
kaoD
In your face!

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paulrademacher
They hired some very good ones. Jeremy Ashkenas (Backbone, Underscore,
Coffeescript) and Sam Clay (NewsBlur, DocumentCloud) were both there.

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danso
To be fair, the NYT did hire, among many other technical talents, both Jeremy
Ashkenas (Backbone/CoffeeScript) and Mike Bostock (D3), who may not be
engineers by training, but are at the forefront of web and interaction
technology.

But the problem isn't just number and/or quality of engineers. It's about top-
down leadership and mindsets that encourage and cultivate engineer-led
innovation. Sure, some of Google's early employees invented some huge projects
with their 20% time, but that's because that was an engineering company that
geared itself towards such projects. Media companies were huge money makers in
the 90s and early 2000s. The money that spawns massive startups today would've
been pocket change for them back then.

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luckluckgoosed
Mike Bostock just finished his Ph.D. in Computer Science (in the School of
Engineering) at Stanford, so I would argue he is the definition of an engineer
by training.

Also note the article says that the NYTimes didn't hire enough "engineers and
data scientists", which apparently got cut off in the title here.

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mrcactu5
I can think of several other news agencies - other than NYT - who still
haven't taken analytics seriously. This could be a blueprint for how to build
the case.

