- I began a post on this topic with the words:"I keep seeing people saying 'you know how journalism and the internet can work better? Have the journalists and the coders sit beside each other. Wonderful things will happen.'" I called the suggestion "100% bullshit". And gave some anecdotes.
Well. This got quite the reaction.
Some people agreed. Many people disagreed. Some did it direct. Others did it through the medium of subtweeting. It seemed worth collecting a lot of the disagreement here, because the most useful feedback was over Twitter, and it's easier to collect Twitter reactions on Storify than Wordpress.
Let me just reiterate what I wasn't saying. I wasn't saying that journalists and coders/developers can't ever make things happen. What I was saying was that just sitting them together and hoping that great things will result won't succeed, because they operate in different ways. - First here (though not first to respond; this isn't in any way organised by time) was Tom Phillips, editorial director at Buzzfeed UK:
Argument by @charlesarthur against journo/dev collaboration is actually a good argument FOR journo/dev collaboration https://theoverspill.wordpress.com/2015/05/29/great-lies-of-our-time-journalists-and-coders-should-sit-together-to-create-amazing-stuff/ …- Well, yes, it is an argument for collaboration. Because that was the thing that didn't work. And I'd actually wanted it to work.
What I was interested in hearing about was examples where the two groups could work together, and produce something successfully. So when people told me I was wrong, I asked for counterexamples where it had gone right. - Here was one of the best:
@charlesarthur I think you're ignoring the work done by many teams in many newsrooms that pair developers with journalists everyday.- Though he did add a proviso:
- @charlesarthur I don't deny that there *aren't* workflow differences between a dev and a journalist. But there are ways to work around it.
- @charlesarthur All these teams have slightly different workflows, but all have developers and journalists collaborating on quick projects.
- That's useful to hear, because it's the speed which in my experience had been the difficult thing to achieve.
- And another:
@charlesarthur We make software in a newsroom every day, w/ agile processes, user-centered design, and a lotta love. http://blog.apps.npr.org/2014/06/04/how-we-work.html …- Brian Boyer's link contains the great way to think about this:
- "Here’s the metaphor I’ve been trying out on reporters and editors:
"We [on the Visuals team] want to be your rhythm section. But that’s not to say we’re not stars. We want to be the best rhythm section. We want to be James Brown’s rhythm section. But we’re not James. We’re gonna kick ass and make you look good, but we still need you to write the songs. And we play together." - Love that. (Did you know Jimi Hendrix played in James Brown's band for a while? Anyhow.)
- When at the Guardian I did see the Datablog team producing quick turnarounds on data analysis pieces. What I tended to see more often though was projects developed with a specific timescale and goal in mind: election results and associated analysis, or long-term projects which require a lot of deep analysis where the data has to be made sense of, and then analysed by journalists.
- A good example of that being this 2013 Guardian analysis of offshore wealth and this 2014 analysis of Tesco landbanking - which were pointed out to me by Max Harlow, who explained the dev side:
@charlesarthur In the former identifying 'interesting' people from a list of thousands --based on political donors, the wealthy/notable- @charlesarthur In latter, automating queries to land registry, filtering out where Tesco has a store built (using their own store locator)
- Max makes good points, and I think that's the canonical example where the relationship is both necessary and beneficial. Figuring out who is a notable person is something journalists are (supposed to be) good at, while figuring out how to handle big unstructured datasets, or querying sometimes fragile APIs, is just the sort of thing that any dev would like - especially those working at a high-profile news organisation who can then say "I worked on that" when the story comes out.
- Update: Leila Haddou, who worked on the landbanking investigation, explained how the dev/journalist collaboration came about:
@charlesarthur I sought developer help and then secured approval from editors to authorise time for the collaborations- @charlesarthur I would add that the collaboration with a developer saved me at least a fortnight of manual work for the land banking story
- @charlesarthur I agree we don't always need to physically sit together, but during specific investigations I think it essential that we do
As seen on
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Great truths of our time: 'journalists and coders should sit together to create amazing things'
Many people disagreed when I suggested that journalists and developers in news organisations work in different ways, at different speeds, and on different things.
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