A couple of decades ago, in recognition of the value of openness, news organizations began hiring ombudsmen (Clark Hoyt, Debra Howell and Alicia Shepard among the current generation). A couple of years ago, editors began blogging to let readers get a glimpse of the sausage-making process of assembling a news report. (John Robinson and Howard Weaver have been among the most dedicated.)
Today, Web developers at news organizations are beginning to blog about their efforts. It’s part of a laudable open-source movement in journalism.
A recent post by Andrei Scheinkman and Derek Willis on the NYTimes.com “Open” blog describes the site’s cool new Represent interactive tool: “Using your address as a starting point, Represent figures out which political districts you live in and who represents you at different levels of government. It draws maps that show how where you live fits into the political geography of the city. And using information collected from around the Web, it presents a customized activity stream that tracks what the people who represent you are doing.”
The developers also describe exactly how the feature was built. That’s impressive. So is this: the NYTimes.com Developer Network shares the application programming interface for many of its interactive features.
…By the way, the Open Blog is “about open source technology at The New York Times, written by and primarily for developers.” Yet another level of transparency.
Meanwhile, at Spokesman.com, assistant managing editor/digital Ryan Pitts is continuing a strong tradition of transparency. On the Site Update blog he discusses bug fixes and feature requests in the beta version of the newly relaunched site. Site visitors can suggest a change or flag a glitch, and see whether and when it gets adopted or fixed.
The relaunched site has some tagging-based functionality that’s unique and quite impressive — including a customizable “live stream” of all new content on the site (such as breaking news, blog posts and reader comments), and navigation that’s based on “topics, times, places and media.”
We all know what Adrian Holovaty has done for the advancement of data in an open-source environment. But he’s far from alone. Data geeks like Willis and Pitts are part of a growing community of skilled Web developers who are changing the landscape for news sites, and writing openly about the process. It’s fun to be able to watch their efforts unfold.
(And to be completely transparent, I should note that I worked with Pitts in Spokane, but left in 2007 before any of the current development work began.)
