Posted Sunday, March 21, 2010 at 2:59 p.m. by Chris Amico in Frameworks for Reporting about Django, journalism and programming
The Atlantic seems to be settling into its new site, despite a rocky relaunch. James Fallows is blogging again, and Andrew Sullivan and Jeffrey Goldberg are back to disagreeing over Israel and Palestine, instead of the nuances of web design and information architecture. As far as I can tell from the limited vantage point of my feed reader, things are getting back to normal.
But the brief turbulence that followed the relaunch of the rebuilt and redesigned site was interesting in the ways it failed. By most accounts, it did what it was meant to do: the diverse group of writers covering a range of issues were herded (with the exception of Sullivan) into topical "channels" meant to emphasize the institution over the individual.
All that would have been fine, except that the Atlantic had largely built its web presence on the backs of those individuals. Ezra Klein summed up the situation well just after the relaunch:
As things stood a week ago, there really was no Atlantic online. Instead, there was a respected magazine called The Atlantic Monthly that had agreed to offer web hosting to a certain number of blogs. You never heard anyone say "did you read the Atlantic online today?" Instead, it was whether you'd read Ta-Nehisi, or Andrew, or Fallows. The magazine designated them "voices," but the redesign suggests that it eventually realized they were the only ones being heard.
Fallows in particular is an interesting case study (and the Atlantic writer I read most). He writes about international news and politics and tech as news happens, and there are channels for that. And sometimes he writes about beer and personal jet packs and boiled frogs. It's not entirely clear where in that august journal all of that belongs.
This wasn't so much a problem when everything Fallows wrote lived at jamesfallows.theatlantic.com. When his personal blog was redistributed across a handful of preset channels, none of which were his, it became a problem.
Think on that for a bit.
Last summer, I interviewed Scott Rosenberg about his book Say Everything, a history of blogging. At the time, I asked him what was so magical about the fact that blogs are almost universally organized in reversed-chronological order, with new stuff on top:
"It's not so much that it's magical," he told me. "It's just that it works." Running an online magazine, Salon.com, he'd often run into difficulty figuring out how to order content to show that something was new. Icons and labels touting "New!" or "Updated!" content just made the page more of a mess.
It wasn't clear, new to whom, new since when. The blog format sort of liberated us from thinking about all that stuff. When you wanted to write something, you could just write it, click a button, and the software would take care of organizing it for us.
In letting go of every editor's desire to put everything in just the right place, he found writers could focus on writing. It's no accident that the advent of simple blogging software helped lead to an explosion of online creativity.
So why is any of this important? Well, some of us are programmers.
I've been thinking about how structure influences content lately because I write code for a news organization, and I do so in the industrial age of the web, using a modern web development framework.
Those of us who do this, and there are a growing number who do, are in a position to build exactly what we want, to create new work flows on the fly, to structure information in just the right way for just the right story.
Much of the conversation around programmers in the newsroom revolves around data and statistics, in part because many of those who now code used to do CAR.
But for those of us who didn't, programming offers a way to structure information that doesn't normally come in tables. It gives us the chance to build frameworks for reporting, to drive news gathering in ways that bring out the best in reporters and give our audiences the most information in the most meaningful and accessible ways.
The simplicity of blogging unleashed a torrent of creativity. Giving writers a personal space to create led them to write in a conversational style, about things they cared about, and to build communities around that content.
It's time to think about how we organize the information we have, and to start building the structures we need.
The other reason I'm thinking about all this is the panel I pitched to ONA. If you want to talk about all this more, and hear people far smarter than me talk about it, vote while there's still time.
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