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Saving Journalism With Flash and Java
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?"
and must die!
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
I welcome our new ASCII overlords, wait, it's New York Magazaine, I welcome our new AXCII overlords.
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing. Emo Philips
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
The question should be: Does a move away from traditional ways of serving news, mean the end of journalism? This is more hand wringing by print media about their waning fortunes. In fact TV, newspapers and news magazines didn't realize we were in a recession, because their revenue stream (advertising) was enhanced by the high spending presidential election. More and more stories are broken outside traditional media. The real story is how do journalists continue to do their job without the structure of a newspaper or wire service.
Display Applications are for web sites.
Research applications are for research.
Content is for journalism.
Journalism receives data from research.
Journalism provides raw materials to the web.
The web presents them to us.
IT and developers create that web and hence its doodads.
Journalists (and other creators) then populate that web and doodad with content. ...
The point being: No, java / flash / doodads won't save journalism. And journalism isn't dying. It still exists but has a WEALTH of new contributors, which leaves demand for the few highly trained contributors low enough that many are leaving the field. Yet we still get our news.
I don't like doodads. When I want news I want content. Not buttons. Not animations (unless they are truly pertinent).
Journalists that create doodads are trying to salvage their career by doing something that is not PART of their career. Just like Developers who try to create content.
So ... long answer given the short answer is: No, doodads won't save journalism. But journalism is evolving, not dying.
It is more productive to voice thoughtful opinions (reply) than to judge (moderate) others.
Technology can help illustrate a good story, of course.
However, the story is the key. What we need much more of, what the real savior of newspapers will be, it hard-hitting, in-depth investigations, and scoops. This worked for Hearst, among others. And the World really needs critical, trained, intelligent people examining what our corporations, our governments and their agents are up to, now more than ever in history.
Any blogger can paraphrase an AP feed, it doesn't take brains. This is what newspapers have been concentrating on in the past few years, while ignoring actual journalism.
Also, there's plenty examples of how technology is misused in TV media. Bugs, hyperbole-laced graphics, and skewed graphs. Let's not replicate that either. Let's not see powerpoint presentation news. By all means illustrate the facts, but make sure you have the facts too.
Really, they should partner with Amazon to get their papers delivered to the Kindle automatically for a subscription fee.
Also, Amazon should release an ebook reader designed for netbooks.
Both would go a long way toward getting revenue for their publications.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
...but I really prefer my news to be reported in text and pictures. The occasional Flash apps that BBC sometimes uses to explore stories feel slow and clunky. Information osmosis time is limited to the speed and pace of the program, whereas reading a text article is limited only by the user's ability to scan through it, which can be done at their leisure.
I feel like I am in the majority when I say that most of my news-reading comes during work during the few minutes I get every hour or so when waiting on something (like a compile). I don't really have the time to tinker around with a simulation exploring the possibilities. And even if I did, my patience will likely wear thin unless the simulation is either really exciting (not the case in the article) or something I'm really interested in (also not the case in the article).
Yes, it's kinda cool. But changing the face of modern journalism? I think not.
Dear Java Hating Slashdot Editors,
Java is not responsible for "generating class loader errors", any more than Perl is responsible for all the HTML errors on the Slashdot front page.
Here's the link to the W3C HTML Validator, go get yourself a clue.
So if I stick my peen in MORE girls it LESSENS my chances of finding one with AIDS?
No. Obviously not. The idea is based on a fictional, purely heterosexual world. The point was if there were MORE promiscuous women, your chances of getting AIDS from any one of them is much lower than if there were fewer promiscous women. But the converse is not true. Not matter how many promiscuous women there are, no matter what percentage of promiscuous women have AIDS, your chances of finding one with AIDS will always increase with the number you 'stick your peen into,' young padawhan.
That's the whole point of Java-based visual model -- it helps to eliminate erroneous perceptions such as yours.
My blog
The linked articles are exactly what's wrong with newspaper sites.
I go to the newspaper for two things: become informed about current events, and laugh at the horoscopes. I have no use for silly little games and whatnot.
If newspapers want to become relevant, they need to expand their NEWS horizons and print news that matters to ME. A fire across town is NOT news; it's gossip about people I don't know. If said fire concens you, you're going to know about it before the newspaper does.
The Governor getting impeached is news, as is the reasons for his iompeachment. The Libertarians' and Greens' Presidential candidates' stances on the issues was news, and it wasn't even covered.
They have become marginalized because what they print is largely worthless.
Now, computer simulations in the other link are a different story altogether. IF it's not just done for show. Unfortunately most of them are just for show.
Free Martian Whores!
If you think plain ASCII text can't cause a system failure on loading, you need to spend some time grading undergraduate essays. Or reading corporate memos. Or, for that mater, some of the more egregious /. article summaries.
-- MarkusQ
P.S. If you think plane ASC 2 text can't on loading cause failure off your system, need too spend sometime grading undergraduate written by essays. Ore reading corporate-memos. Ore, four that matter, sum of teh more eggreigious article sumaries on this cite.
Only if you're looking at the title alone.
I actually work tech at a big media organization, so this is something I think about constantly, and the article is a perfect example of the media missing the goddamn point.
The way to persist is to deliver a better product. Print journalism is by far the most prolific news medium in existence, and traditional print newspapers are still the biggest providers of that content...right now.
But increasingly they're cutting jobs and reducing the quality of their physical product in order to try and retain their profitability, and, magically, it's not helping their product.
At the same time they're investing in ideas like the ones described in the article, which are 100% substance-free, cute little web 2.0 widgets that may occupy a few minutes of someone's time, but don't add any lasting value to the product, and don't pull the new users they need (people like us), but instead appeal primarily to the same technophobes who are their core market already.
What they need to do is push an actual, meaningful, web presence, one with persistence, where content lasts longer than a week or so, and where the web content is clear, clean, and accessible to aggregators and search engines, so they can take advantage of the long tail.
It's inevitable that the print product is going to get superceded by a web product. The industry is dragging its feet, however, on really dealing out a first class web product, and so they're basically guaranteeing that when the first really savvy web-based news organization comes along, that they're going to get their marketshare ripped away.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Bluntly? If your news page is filled with flash and java, I'll close the browser never to return. If you have no content and have to mask it with flashy graphics, I don't want to hear your story.
It's the same with news networks. Ever watched the news recently? It's flashy "breaking news" jingles and enough FX to make the average hollywood movie drop its jaw in awe (which, btw, also rely more and more on flashy explosions and FX to hide that the script is thin enough to fit in a standard envelope), but where's the beef?
JibJab summed it up quite nicely.
Gimme news! Gimme information! And keep your flashy crap!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I'd add John Stewart to that list.
The Green Lantern? Seriously?
Seriously.
Wow.
That's from someone who subscribes to multiple newspapers, and whose idea of a fun afternoon is re-reading articles in The New Yorker and Harper's Magazine.
But apparently not reading the titles of TV shows nor their credits.
Assuming there's nothing on CSPAN, of course.
Or Boomerang.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
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.
It can, but it doesn't always do that. Sometimes it makes it worse by adding more fluff, like the flashy touchscreens and "holograms" on CNN.
I work for a newspaper company. We haven't cut the quality of our physical product, and we're still quite profitable. Then again, we're in the midwest and people here still like physical papers.
That being said, I think the big keys is to have exclusive stories that people want to read.
I read the baseball story linked in the article. The Java app allowed users to see the numbers for themselves, but I didn't feel it was necessary. What really turned me off was how poorly the article itself was written. I think a well written article could have made the case without the need for the java app.
I still think on principle, technology if well utilized will help journalism.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
The article focused on a hypothetical heterosexual world in which all the men but only a few of the women were promiscuous. In this situation, the promiscuous women quickly caught the virus and became a sort of viral clearinghouse, spreading HIV to every man with whom they had contact. The men, in turn, brought it home to their wives. If the number of promiscuous women increased, the Landsburg-Kremer model posited, each man would be less likely to find an infected woman in his nightly wanderings, and the spread of HIV would slow.
Not sure of the link to flash (only skimmed TFA), but flash has apperantly cured AIDS AND made women more willing to sleep with me. Either one really would have made up for all the annoyances, both together? Can we declare Flash a saint?
Yea, we're still making a 20% margin, so we're profitable as well...Damn profitable. If I could invest my savings at 20% today, I'd retire.
But 10 years ago it was a 35% margin and our circulation was 25% larger. What's yer parent company, just out of curiosity?
Don't kid yourself that the industry is going to do an amazing rebound. The demographics suck, the paper and ink costs are steadily increasing, and the internet is eating up a big chunk of the ad pool.
The thing that bothers me is that the applications of technology suck. Making a widget to view scores is fine, but it's pointless without a top notch web presence, and very few sites have that.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
I'm right there with you. Who wants to watch 10 minutes of video instead of an article that could be consumed in 90 seconds? (30 seconds for CNN)
I have no problem with video being made available as an extra...If you've got a journalist somewhere, have 'em shoot a little tape while they're there, then post it online with their story, and use that to drive traffic to your website.
But taking away the text article and replacing it with flash or video? That sucks.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
For most web applications, a developer should think of three layers:
1. Semantic information (Mostly HTML/XHTML, although other semantic content such as movies or games work as well)
2. Basic layout (CSS, non-semantic images)
3. Interactive/Dynamic features(JavaScript, Flash, Applets, and anything else strictly used to dynamically enhance the user experience)
This ensures graceful degradation and flexibility. In general, the larger the percentage of web applications using this model, the better.
If you're able to use Flash/Java without breaking the model, fine by me. Just don't expect me to actually utilize those features.
Important stuff
Perhaps journalism is suffering because unsubstantiated lies are repeated so often people think they're true.
I work for the Omaha World-Herald. We own most of the papers in Nebraska and Iowa. We just had the second best year of the company (second only to 2007). Ink costs are much higher. Paper costs are much higher. We've installed ink saving software. I really think we could cut down on paper waste.
We also have Omaha.com and we're pushing our web presence more and more.
What makes the print product work is that our advertisers still greatly prefer a physical insert over a web ad.
Circulation is down a bit, but we don't make money directly by circulation. We make money off advertising.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Except consumers want video. Our web site was going down the tube, and another local site was getting more hits than us. Video was the #1 reason. Now we produce our own video.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
With the power of Java applets, we will discover a brand new dimension of "breaking news".
Why is it that any bozo coder who himself codes mistakes into his apps, is then hot and ready to blame the language? Dude, Java does not write itself. If you wrote it in a fragile way, then it is your fault--not the language. All that said, I'm delighted to see the NYTimes trying new things.
Unless the kind of man who sticks his peen into multiple women, tends to find different partners than those who don't...
What's most noteworthy is that there are two settings for male behavior in the simulator. Each of them is totally unrealistic, and they give completely different results. ... So, what am I supposed to learn here?
Not to mention that there's nothing too new about the results, and somehow people in the 60s understood them without a java applet. Basically what happens is that promiscuous women implicitly quarantine the men who find them. It just so happens, if I understand correctly, that there is a portion of the phase-space, where increasing the rate of promiscuity in women serves to reduce the overall rate of disease by concentrating the disease among the promiscuous while keeping men from sleeping with the unpromiscuous women.
Now, if that sounds like a realistic description of the world to you...
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
Meh, I googled you and the first editor and publisher article was how you cut 12,000 circ this year. Even for a big paper like the OWH, that's a hefty chunk, and that sort of measure really kicks your upbeatness in the fork. Not half as bad as the AJC though; those jokers cut almost 6 times that recently.
Nice that you're not corporate owned though. Corporate ownership is the suck. Our profits are eaten up to support larger, less profitable papers, and to pay fat corporate salaries.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Long answer: because it's more portable that way. I don't have a fancy-shmancy iPhone where I would have ubiquitous Internet access (but it doesn't matter anyway because it can't run Java or Flash!) so taking RSS feeds on my gadget with me on the run works best. No need for pictures (most of the time), gimme the vanilla information.
We're all hypocrites. We all have hidden parts, it's the contrast between them that make us more a hypocrite than others
Say what you want about the NYT as an old media organization, but I can't think of any other media group (ALL media, not just journalistic) that has been so open to creating APIs for their collections of data (campaign money, movie reviews, etc), and I think they are putting out a few open-source projects too. Their blog about "open source technology" (their words): http://open.blogs.nytimes.com/
I read the baseball story linked in the article. The Java app allowed users to see the numbers for themselves,
No it didn't. It allowed me to see the BBOD and force-quit Safari is all.
I blame java because "compile once, run anywhere" was sold as an attribute of the language, not the developers.
In my experience, whenever I try to use a different Java applet, it's better than even odds I'll have to spend an hour installing the specific jvm for which it was built. Of the two applets pointed to by the article, only the baseball simulation worked with my Mozilla 3.0 plus Sun built jdk 1.6 RPM.
Perhaps if I were running Windows, life with java would be easier, but that's like noting that khat is easier to obtain in Somalia than the U.S.
Here's a pretty well-funded, all-Flash newsmagazine published by real journalists: http://www.flypmedia.com/
and that's reporting subjects with some real research and analysis, without fear or favour, not beholden to corporate or government interests and without being biased by the prevailing memes.
In my opinion, people are moving away from "traditional" journalism not so much because of the format or media but because they are sick of recycled, verbatimly quoted press-releases and propaganda pieces being constantly repeated with almost no variation by every media outlet.
The attractiveness of "alternative" media seems to be the increased variety of opinion available.
I subscribe to a traditional print paper, so I do pay something for news. If there's government corruption or incompetency, I want to read about it. If there's a war going on, I want to read about it. I want to read about major - or even minor - crime and accidents, depending on how close to home they occur. I want to read about changes in law that affect me. I want to read about major economic and business stories (e.g., "IBM terminates several hundred contractors"; "UNC drops effort to open airport"). I want to read about major social trends. I like the editorial cartoons, the comics, and the sudoku.
This morning I read a story on the new Governor's agenda, and I read a story that the outgoing Governor just signed an order that e-mail should be treated as a public record.
I suspect there are all kinds of proposals going to the state legislature that I'd be curious about, but that I don't know about.
That being said, I think the big keys is to have exclusive stories that people want to read.
The problem is, you all (the "traditionals", at least in the decisionmaking rooms it seems) are defining "exclusive" as "first" and that becomes "rushed and shallow." You know what aggregaters have taught me? That a huge percentage of newspapers' "front pages" are the same story, in the same words regurgitated, as the wire stories. Those aren't the ones I come back to or spread around... the ones I come back to (and share) are those with considered analysis and thought. First to market "scoops" just doesn't pay the bills so much anymore.
Consumers also want text. I can read 5 articles in the time it takes to watch one. But if you don't provide text I won't come at all.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Most of the comments here sum it up nicely: The craft of and the demand for good journalism hasn't changed. The means of distributing it is changing rapidly.
I read great stories all the time. In the LA Times, on the Reuters and AP wires, in the New York Times.
I read all of their stories exclusively online. I have not dirtied my hands nor killed any trees by picking up a newspaper in many years.
Paying for news in today's free-for-all Internet is another subject. All things being equal, it's hard to justify paying for something you can get free somewhere else.
In a way, I hope this changes. It leaves news outlets to rely entirely on advertising for revenue on the Internet with implications that should be obvious.
I think micropayments would make a great counter to reliance on advertising revenue but we're a long way from that being feasible.
Good luck finding your niche!
But for the love of god, I do not want annoying prompts to update java or flash. ever. period.
sigs are for losers (except to point out that sigs are for losers)
If you get a serious answer to that question, please do your readers a favor and ignore it.
I had a discussion about this a few years ago with someone who worked at the local paper. I had remarked that the World section had gone from being a full section of the paper to taking up an area about the size of a postcard buried part way through the front section on a page that was otherwise completely filled with advertisements. It was very easy to miss that it even existed. This might have been a gradual transition. I had already switched to reading a better newspaper (at the time a rather bulky paper made close enough that local news was still relevant but of sufficiently high quality that it had national readership). This employee happened to be in a position to know why this change was made.
Seeing declining readership and with competitive pressure from a better (but not exactly good) paper from the neighboring city which had been expanding news coverage to be more of a regional paper and the above mentioned paper with national readership and good reporting, the local paper decided to conduct a survey to find out what readers wanted. Once the survey was finished and the results tabulated and analyzed, the decision makers had a report summarizing what the readers wanted. Or rather, what readers thought they wanted. The paper was changed to reflect the results of the survey. This was a terrible mistake.
I suspect in most businesses, and at least in the market for this local newspaper, customers do not know what they want. They think they know what they want and will be happy to tell you if you ask, but if you offer them what they ask for they won't buy it.
For what it's worth, I still read a competing newspaper every morning and find it superior to the alternatives for general news. The alternatives certainly do have a place. Web sites and feed aggregators do a better job of covering niche topics, radio is a great medium for delivering interviews, and television... well I'm sure it's good for something but I only get local over the air stations which used to have some good news programs, but all I've seen lately provides less news in an hour than you'd get just reading the headlines of the first page of three sections of a newspaper (and often news headlines that were in the newspaper days ago). If I had to choose between a newspaper and any or all of these other news sources, I'd still pick the newspaper. The employee in the story above no longer works for a newspaper. As readership continued to fall, jobs were cut, retirees were not replaced, and he found himself doing a lot more work without additional compensation. He left the paper for a better job with another company. The local paper is still around, but it has fallen foul of financial reporting rules, has been renegotiating terms on its debt, no longer pays a dividend, and it's still not a very good paper. They do get a lot of local traffic to their web site, however.
Remember RFC 873!
I prefer text for that reason, but ask people who run media sites and they'll tell you that video is what is in demand right now.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
It is my professional opinion that Java sucks dirty-donkey-parts.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
what difference does it make whether you have a constant internet connection or not? if you're going to download RSS feeds from the internet onto your gadget, you could do the same with a Java applet or Flash. it's not like streaming video where you need an internet connection to view it.
they're just another form of digital multimedia. and just like photos, not every article needs them, but when it's appropriate they can add a lot to the article. i mean, why hold back when the technology is available, costs nothing, and is easy to use? if there's a story on a new space mission, why not let readers see the accompanying photos or video footage?
this isn't the 90's. we're living in an age now when almost everyone has a cellphone or some other sort of portable device with storage capacity measured in gigabytes and capable of displaying rich multimedia like images/video and play CD-quality audio. so if you're writing a game review, why not include a video clip of the gameplay? if necessary, content publishers can use a format (like MIME) that degrades gracefully. if your device can't play video, it'll just show the images and rich text--or just plain text.
images will probably still be the most common type of media accompanying news stories, but there's no reason for us to arbitrarily limit ourselves to text and images. it's not going to "save" journalism (because there's nothing to be saved), but it would be cool to read a story about a new space vehicle and be able to view a rotatable 3D model of the vehicle.
Getting too pedantic about what is and isn't journalism leads the discussion away from focusing on the great tools that are being developed to help the average citizen understand the powers that be (government, corporations, etc..).
The Sunlight Foundation has funded a lot of really great web tools, widgets and applets that show how congress works, track money donated to candidates, expose corporate corruption, and many other areas of coverage that the film noir investigative journalist types might still consider their turf.
Anyone can do good journalism, anyone can do bad journalism. I think talking about who is helping to expose and disseminate new information that is in the public interest (news) is more important that talking about the news industry as such.
If you would look into the statistics of a news site, you would notice the enormous number of pageviews on the front page, how few people end up at the level of an article and how fewer people ever visit a back ground story.
The challenge for journalist is thus to engage readers, but also not to waste their time.
For that, journalists must carefully choose the media for telling the story.
Infographics can actually help in time management. Also assisting in block reading would be useful.
Examples:
Harder to do then just plain text? Definitely! More compelling and giving more insight? Absolutely!