The new gig

Have I told you all about my exciting new job? It’s at a newspaper, and I report up through the IT department…

I know what you’re thinking: IT is dead!

A while back I swore that after 14 or so years working as an IT professional, I wouldn’t waste my time in an environment of bullies and disablers. That attitude is dead and if it isn’t, someone should step on its neck until it stops yelling “MOVE!”

This position is (supposed to be) different. My main customer is the Newsroom. My first project is pretty boring by the POP! POP!-standards of what’s exciting on the Internet. It’s a behind the scenes and long overdue replacement of the web CMS. It’s a good sized project that I’d characterize it as an intermediate to advanced technical challenge. It’s been done before and there are plenty of resources to draw on. Nothing terribly fancy by Internet standards but newspapers have a way of making their own problems bigger.

The Newspaper System Cycle

In order to understand the challenges that many newspapers are going through these days, you have to understand what I call The Newspaper System Cycle (or Long Cycle, or Long Dumb Cycle.) It’s true in other systems and industries but I only have direct experience with news.

The typical publishing system lifecycle lasts around 10 years— two years evaluating systems, two years installing and configuring it, and the next four to six years hating it.

In years one and two, the news org vets a handful of systems by the handful of companies in the world that make publishing systems. These are companies the general population has never heard of before. For the most part they make highly proprietary complex systems. Producing a physical product whose content changes by 95% on daily basis isn’t easy, and they’re there to remind you of that every step of the way.

In years three and four they install and customize the system. These systems are huge. First there’s the huge proprietary database to store your data in their own proprietary way. Then various components need be configured or created to handle everything from a multi-faceted editorial workflow, to advertising, to photos and video, to syndication feeds, to plate or film output, any of which can be another system of varying age, quality and capabilities. This is usually when they buy new equipment both for the backend and later, the end user.

Once installed, everyone that touches the system spends the next four to six years hating it. Vendors are hard to reach or expensive to talk to. People move on. Graduates discover their new technical skills can’t be applied. Oldsters can’t figure out why the young are so righteous or feel entitled. All of them start figuring out ways to work around the system.

Repeat.

Timing is everything

Imagine beginning this process in late 2005. By the time they settle on a vendor and get ready to install the pieces for the system —2007-ish— Facebook goes from “this thing college kids do” to “this thing to see what my kids do in college.” The dominant smartphones are made by Palm (gone) and Blackberry (going), and are business in the front and the back. The iPhone is brand new, doesn’t allow 3rd party apps and the establishment thinks Apple has made a terrible mistake. Oh, and there’s that Twitter thing.

By late 2009 everything is in place. The troops are trained, the roll out schedule is in place and all systems are go. Months later, Steve Jobs announces the iPad. News of US Airways Flight 1549 landing on the Hudson, Michael Jackson’s death and various earthquakes, natural disasters and celebrity fuckups break on Twitter. A year later Facebook claims it’s 500 millionth user.

At the end of that first four years, messy install behind it, bugs squashed or tracked, IT lifts it’s head up, pats itself on the back for “meeting the business needs of the company through technology” and waits for the vendor to provide the next maintenance update. None of them really understands why the Newsroom wants to do this Twitter thing. After all, the Newsroom always wants something [Eyeroll].

I’m here because that sucks

Outside the building, everyone lives in the real world. They have iPads and Androids, video chat with distant friends and relatives, LOL on Twitter or proclaim their personal value systems on unsuspecting Facebook friends and spend hours anywhere but a newspaper’s website. Inside the building, technically speaking, these same folks have to live with limitations of the past.

My goal (as stated during my interviews) is to break that cycle. It’s just one of the things that’s painted daily newspapers into a corner and these kinds of internal distractions compound the problems. The bottom line is that journalism is in trouble.

In general, I want executive editors to go back to doing journalism full time rather than studying analytics and SEO-backed business models. I want advertising execs to stop junking up their websites and develop products that respect the audience. I want developers to give us a second look because we’re a Rails/Python/PHP/Whatever shop. I want readers to feel like our websites respect them and their time. Most of all, I want IT to be the thing that gets us there, not the excuse for why we can’t.

P.S. I’m going to write this kind of crap here from time to time, but I’m still going to post stupid, immature stuff here. That’s not going anywhere.