Can't We All Just Get Along: Sharing Code w/ Your Brother

In the world of journalism major media corps have many children, but the children not familiar with the concept of sharing digital developments unless momma or papa forces them. "If you don't play nice, we will cut your budget another 10%."

With print products, traditionally completely finished content is shared between sister organizations. Stories. Photos. Packages. While I am young to the industry, I have not seen very many collaborative efforts on reporters from sister papers. For example: If there a natural disaster, multiple papers from the same mother company will all send reporters to the location. Then they send reporters to Washington to get the reaction. What they don't do is say, "Okay - you, from paper X, are 50 miles away from the disaster; you go to the disaster. You, from paper Y, are located in D.C.; You go see what congress is doing about this. Then we will bring the pieces together and have our editors fight over who gets to edit it."

In the same way that this happens, technology developments are rarely shared also. When they are shared it is in a completed form. For example, paper B creates a package on a major local event that becomes national, brothers and sisters of paper B pick up the package through a company intranet. Besides interactive story packages or video, the only other example I have seen of major sharing is major company wide site designs, and this is usually to standardize ad sizes in order to sell national advertisements.

Why not share more pieces?

For example, a individual newspaper decides to jump on the Django band wagon as the app's foundation. Another newspaper under the same mother co. does the same. Both get databases from the state to build an app on local school statistics in comparison to the general population. Both generate the app in their respective shops, across the country, without communicating to each other.

In the end - the work they have done overlaps. The general population data would come from the census bureau, so both parties would have developing similar structures. Well, poop! Who wants to do work that is already done, when we can start on the next project?

Even with the education data - there are certain characteristics of the data that are going to be the same.

I use the Django example, but this idea applies to those blocks of code too.

I am not sure why this hasn't happened yet. The only reason that I can think of is the loss of identity a newspaper can be subjected to under the umbrella of a media conglomerate. Maybe individual newspapers are not so much brothers and sisters, but more like step-cousins twice removed. They acknowledge each others existence, but they only cross paths at funerals and weddings.

I am advocating the start of a grassroots brotherhood effort. Send a fellow developer at a sister paper in your company an im and see what they are up to.

"Help thy brother's boat across, and Lo! Thine own has reached the shore." - Hindu Proverb