Sometimes I do like to have my ego stroked a bit, and Leah Betancourt interviewed me for Mashable, along with one of my idols, Adrian Holovaty. You can find the story here:
Hey there! If you attended my presentation today at the Nevada Interactive Summit, I’d appreciate it if you could let me know what you thought of it. Thanks!
Oh, and here are links to some of the sites I discussed:
Update: Click here to get a PDF of the entire presentation, along with my notes. I’ve placed it under a Creative Commons license, so let me know if you’d like it in another format.
Most news organizations have been slowly shrinking both their budgets and staffs in the face of a vanishing market. Both insiders and outsiders are divining what went wrong and how to adapt to a new world of publishing. There are at least as many different opinions and strategies as there are keyboards. Even in a world composed of ceaseless chatter, journalists are a verbose and opinionated group.
It’s not that anyone’s appetite for news has diminished. It’s just that they didn’t want what traditional media was serving, or maybe how it was being served. It’s easy to focus on the particular details — the foolishness of considering a daily newspaper a breaking news medium decades after television stole that away, the rank arrogance of newspapers after the disappearance of true competition, or the excessive focus on packaging, at the expense of the product. These are just some of the complaints advanced as reasons for the decline, but whether they’re true in whole or part, they don’t explain much. The truth is far more complicated, and has more to do with the new rhythm and pace of the average person’s life than it does with journalists. I’ve mentioned context in another post, and there’s no need to elaborate on it here.
It’s more interesting to visualize the future of news, especially in light of the latest announcement by the Detroit Media Partnership. Many people in the industry have been wondering which major metropolitan daily would first switch to online-only publication. The well-respected (but rarely read) Christian Science Monitor recently made the news when it announced it would stop printing and publish only on the Internet, but they’re a different kind of publication from the daily metropolitan newspaper. It seems that the Detroit JOA is showing that, instead of a radical break with the past, we might see a more gradual move away from print dominance to a more complicated distribution system. They’re still going to print a daily newspaper, but they just won’t deliver it to homes for most of the week.
On its face, it seems a fairly bold step, at least for newspapers — they focus their print efforts on the days where they get most of their print revenue (82 percent is the number I’ve seen). But when you break the daily newspaper habit for home readers, you stand a very good chance of breaking their print habit entirely. After all, once you get used to reading it online for four days out of the week, why not give up the print subscription? In any event, it’s a great move for everyone else, because the results will be extremely illuminating. It’s not a trend yet, but eventually most newspapers will face similar choices. Not all of them, as John Duncan points out in an excellent post.
John has always been good at pointing out the obvious fact that for-profit media organizations are businesses, and should be run as such. It’s a refreshing viewpoint and moves away from the overall hand-wringing mentality that dominates media industry discussions, conducted mostly by folks who yearn for simpler times that they understood. But really the discussion should not be about what New Media is or isn’t, or what the future of Journalism is or isn’t. It should be focused on the simple questions, like “What do our customers really want and how much are they willing to pay?” Or given that newspapers have at least a decade of experience with the Internet, “Are our online operations still worth it for our particular newspaper?” Other newspapers might ask, “Should we lay off 90 percent of our staff and publish only on the web?”
For some newspapers, the right online presence is just a self-serve interface to their customer account, or even just a brochure listing contact information. For others, maybe the right print presence is no presence at all. These basic questions don’t seem to get discussed much by the right people. I do see a lot of newspapers pouring time and money into their online presence with only the conviction that it’s the future for their business. I’m not so sure they’ve really thought about what that particular future looks like. The only thing I know is that it doesn’t look like their past, with its increasing revenues and comparatively high margins. It looks lean and small, even in good years. For most newspapers, it may be the only future. But it shouldn’t come as a shock.
Privately, I’ve mentioned to friends that the collapse of newspapers may not be such a bad thing in the long run. I’ve compared it to whale falls: When a whale dies and its corpse falls to the ocean floor, its nutrients can support a host of organisms. In a similar way, when a large media organization disappears, it gives smaller, nimbler enterprises room to breathe, in the form of advertising dollars and readers. Alternatively, most newspapers may not close up shop, but just fade and compete with other small news startups, or even passionate amateurs.
One of the reasons I quit the business is that even though I could see what was broken and doesn’t work, I didn’t have a clear idea as to what it would take to fix it. Gannett certainly had a plan, and I was happy to help implement it until it became obvious that it wasn’t going to work either. Kevin Kelly’s recent manifesto “Better Than Free,” clarified things, in the sense that it frames the problem in a clearer way. I’ve been thinking, off and on, about the points Kelly raises, and how they would relate to a news organization. I think this long and rambling post is part of that process. I can see a local news organization (or more) thriving, not just surviving in the future. I don’t see all the details yet, but I see enough that makes me happy.
One of the reasons I switched jobs earlier this year is that after a year and a half of media management, I was getting excited about programming again, thanks in no small part to the joy of working with Brandon Mitchell, a smart programmer and all-around decent guy. I jumped at the chance to develop and maintain software in an academic and scientific environment.
One of the decisions I also made at the time was to change my text editor. For a programmer, the choice of editor you use to write code is a personal statement similar to the one made by participants in the Ford vs. Chevy debate, and argued over in terms that approach religious and political debates. It’s not surprising, since it’s where we spend so much of our time. But for the normal folks who spend most of their day in Word or Outlook, it’s a little mystifying. I’ll try to explain.
I decided to give Emacs another chance. I had tried it several times before, but you must realize that Emacs requires a huge time commitment to learn and use proficiently. It has a unique interface and vocabulary all its own. Emacs is not just an editor, but an entire programming environment. This makes it both an extremely powerful tool and a dangerous waste of time, as you spend time creating the “perfect” work environment, at the expense of the work you were brought in to do in the first place.
It’s not a surprise that Emacs is an excellent butt of jokes. XKCD, the finest geek comic on the Internet, delivers the perfect commentary on editor wars in general, and Emacs in particular:
It’s funny, trust me. But I’m burying the lede, so let’s get back on track. Emacs is an old piece of software. It dates back to the mid-70s, when I was just a little boy. It’s been under constant development since then, and not only is it still actively developed, there is a tremendous amount of free code out there that gives Emacs almost any capability you could want. One reason for this lively community is that Emacs itself consists of a large amount of easily mutable code built on a small, fast and more fixed core. It’s designed for tinkering. Of course, so’s Microsoft Word, which doesn’t quite have the same community or amount of free software, even though it has far more users.
In some ways, it’s because Microsoft is more interested in providing opportunities for businesses to make money selling software, which is an admirable goal. But I also think it’s because changing Word’s behavior is less fun and less elegant, and the people who use Word are also much less likely to attempt to learn how to change it, even if they have a strong need to do so.
Emacs itself is largely written in a form of Lisp, an even older technology than Emacs. It dates back to 1958, which makes it the second-oldest programming language in widespread use today, according to Wikipedia. But that doesn’t make it a hugely popular language. Aside from Emacs and the occasional Lisp shop, there isn’t a lot of Lisp development, although there has been more interest in Lisp of late. It’s never gone away, in part because Lisp allows you to program practical solutions while also keeping the theory of computer science right there on your screen. It’s sometimes maligned for its syntax, which is a little different than most languages and also leads to a profusion of parentheses that can be confusing if your editor isn’t designed to display it properly. Once again, XKCD hits the mark:
The Star Wars reference is particularly apt in relation to Emacs customization, which for a programmer is a lot like a Jedi building his own lightsaber.
The problem with Emacs is that in order to get the editor you want, you’ll probably have to write your own code, and integrate a lot of other people’s code as well. It’s what I did, as everyone did before me. Your Emacs will necessarily be different from mine and anyone else’s, sometimes radically so.
If you use more than one computer — say, one at home, and one at work, or a laptop and a desktop — this leaves you with the problem of keeping your Emacs configurations consistent. The obvious solution, since your Emacs configuration is a bunch of files full of code just like all the other software we produce, is to put your home directory under version control. Also called source control or revision control, this is the software most programmers install right after setting up their editor and their programming language of choice. It’s like an unlimited Undo on steroids, or Apple’s Time Machine feature.
My version control software of choice is git, which is a much more recent piece of software, about three years old. It’s quickly become the flavor of the moment and the version control of choice for some very high-profile and important projects. It’s a wonderfully flexible tool.
Using both Emacs and git together made me think about their relative ages, and about how when seen in the history of tools in general they may as well have been developed on the same day. One of the largest uses of the Internet still involves reading text like this blog post. The written word has been in use for thousands of years, and it’s an essential part of our daily life. Even the most sophisticated technological artifacts are designed in large part by using text — text to describe them, discuss them, define them, and finally implement them in a way that a computer can realize in a more physical way.
It’s easy to look at our new computers and think about the changes to daily life, especially if you still remember when the sound of typewriters echoed in the office. I like to think about the cherry-picking of technology we do on a daily basis. I sit at my new workstation and use a cutting-edge version control system to maintain a thirty-year-old editing environment that uses a fifty-year-old computer language rooted in a technology that’s been with us for about 6,000 years. It puts the novelty of the moment into perspective, and it’s humbling to imagine attempting to contribute to that history in some way.
Sites I’m bookmarking
