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Saving Journalism With Flash and Java

Posted by kdawson on from the looking-forward-and-looking-back dept.

An anonymous reader writes "New York magazine has a story about some of the flashy new ideas that are coming out of the labs of the New York Times. The piece prompted Peter Wayner to dig up some of the old Java applets he wrote to explore whether more promiscuity really stops AIDS and whether baseball can do anything to speed up the games. He notes that these took a great deal of work to produce and it's not possible to do them on a daily basis. Furthermore, they're cranky and fragile, perhaps thanks to Java. Are cool, interactive features the future of journalism on the web? Or will simple ASCII text continue to be the most efficient way for us to mingle our thoughts, especially when ASCII text won't generate a classloading error?"

3 of 206 comments (clear)

  1. saving is not the right adjective by girlintraining · · Score: 4, Informative

    So far the media's use of flash and java has been a major reason for the development and wide-spread use of browser plug-ins to disable those technologies. I reject your reality and substitute my own.

    --
    #fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
  2. It can be done right. by Ilyakub · · Score: 4, Informative

    I've seen very helpful Flash visualizations on news websites that helped understand the story better.

    For example, this interactive map of drug war related deaths in Mexico is very well done. It doesn't just clarify the conflict, but encourages the reader to analyze and research the topic independently in addition to linearly reading the text of an article.

    Just reading an article, listening to the radio or watching a news program often gives the illusion of learning and understanding new information, whereas in reality very little is retained.

    Innovative and interactive ways of presenting information solve this problem.

  3. Re:Cranky and fragile, due to Java? by SpuriousLogic · · Score: 4, Informative

    Java is cranky and fragile? I guess that is why it is used for backend trading applications and banks across the world. 100's of trillions of dollars is just fine to be handled by a cranky and fragile language. Thank god for perl and their fans for such a robust language that it can be used sometimes for partially stable webpages.