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

Nature of the beast

This week's shift left little time to breath. Besides what reporters handed me, I did not  time for extra extras, but I did have time to learn the nature of the beast.
In general, TV stations are behind print media in web development. The major factor lies in deadline structures.
Print newsroom often work for days and for larger stories, weeks, in advance. This gives time for the writer to communicate with interactive department on the development of content.
Broadcast newsrooms work day to day, sometimes even often hour to hour. This gives little room for an interactive department to develop in-depth content for the web.
TV news has special super powers, something that print will never have. TV viewers are more likely to multi-task while consuming media. According to eMarketer, in 2006, 102.6 million adult internet users also watched tv while going online.
WHOA! WHOA! HO! HO! Stop the presses! 102.6 million! What are we doing here people? Why are we not paying more attention to not only 102.6 million, but a 102.6 million which is a captive audience?
Imagine this. Scenario 1: John reads an article in the newspaper, sees a tease for a web extra in print, tears it out and shoves it in his pocket to view later. Scenario 2: Jane is watching TV and she see a plug for more content on the web. In a heighten emotional state of fear, she thinks, "If I don't visit now, then this opportunity will be lost forever." Jane then visits the site. As for John, he never made it to the site, because next time he sees the web tease he tore out, it is shriveled up and dried out, because it just came out of the drier.

Media companies need to turn away from the convenience of creating web content for their print outlets and start pushing resources towards their TV stations. On the station level, web departments need to start developing applications that process content can be packaged under tight deadlines, because that is the nature of the beast.

Image sources:
"Internet's impact chart" was taken from Bottom-Line Pressures Now Hurting Coverage, Say Journalists published by the Pew Research Center.
"US Adult Internet Users Who Use Other Media While Going Online, 2006 (millions)" was taken from Two-Thirds of Internet Users Watch TV While Surfing the Net published by eMarketer.