13 Ways to Talk to a Programmer

Lisa Williams
5:38 PM | bio | Comments: 1

[With apologies to Wallace Stevens.] If you decide to venture beyond talking about how your news organization's site should work into actually changing how it does work, there's one essential skill you'll have to learn: how to talk to a programmer. Most nonprogrammers have no idea how to communicate their idea for a new feature or a whole new website in a way that's going to be useful to the person who's actually building that site. Here are thirteen tips to get you started on the road to fluency: Learn how to write a spec. One of the biggest frustrations... continued...

Topics: Best Practices, Technology
Tagged: communication, design, development, programmers, projects

ManyEyes: Data-Rich Features on the Cheap

Lisa Williams
5:01 PM | bio | Comments: 1

The web offers news organizations whole new ways to present complex stories to readers, but even the emergence of free tools hasn't made online databases or Google Maps mashups a daily commonplace in your average news organization's website. Often, that's because the effort involved in building a rich, complex visualization is just too high for it to become an everyday occurrence. But what if those days are coming to a close? Enter ManyEyes, a free service created by one of IBM's research labs that allows near-instant interactive visualizations of a data set. Your Excel spreadsheet of public job salaries and... continued...

Topics: Audio/Visual, Technology
Tagged: center for future civic media, google maps, manyeyes, mashups, visualization

Ten Things Journalists Should Know About Surviving In a High-Tech Industry

Lisa Williams
1:15 PM | bio | Comments: 6

Journalism is becoming a high tech industry, and that means that career norms for journalists are approaching those of high tech workers -- shorter job tenures, working for smaller companies, and much more. Here are ten things that can help journalists survive Web 2.0 with their sanity intact: High tech is a boom and bust industry. We get laid off when the economy is good, and we get laid off when the economy is bad. Investors get fed up and pull the plug on small companies; at big companies, the CEO must, on ceremonial occasions, throw a few sacrificial victims... continued...

Topics: Best Practices, Financial

Journalism Will Survive the Death of Its Institutions

Lisa Williams
12:38 PM | bio | Comments: 3

Massive layoffs with no end in sight. Wave after wave of acquisitions and mergers fueled by the excesses of artificially cheap capital. Widespread fear that an entire industry and its contributions will stall or simply stop. This describes the news industry today, but it also described the high tech industry in the late eighties and early nineties. continued...

Topics: Financial, Philosophy, Technology
Tagged: business, downturn, future of journalism, institutions, journalism, layoffs, newspapers, technology

News Is Code #1: Attack of the Podium Weasels

Lisa Williams
11:12 AM | bio | Comments: 0

How can technology improve on even the best journalistic work and help journalists hold officials to account? In the first of the News Is Code series, we take a look at the recent Pulitzer won by Dana Priest and Anne Hull of the Washington Post for their series on conditions at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center. continued...

Topics: Audio/Visual, Best Practices, Technology
Tagged: journalism, pulitzer, wapo, washington post

How to Make a Foundation Cry

Lisa Williams
1:17 PM | bio | Comments: 0

"People misunderstood what we mean by innovative -- they looked at what won last year and applied it to a kind, cute, delightful new content area that made us just cry when we had to reject it." -- Gary Kebbel, Knight Foundation, speaking at the Berkman Center for the Internet and Society about the process of judging applications for Year 2 of the Knight 21st Century News Challenge grants.... continued...

Topics: Philosophy
Tagged: berkman, kebbel, knight, newschallenge

Baristanet Book Club Launches with Jay McInerney

Lisa Williams
12:16 PM | bio | Comments: 3

Debbie Galant of Baristanet has launched the Baristanet Book Club, opening with an author interview conducted by Jay McInerney: So, why is Jay McInerney writing for Baristanet? It starts with the precipitous decline in book reviewing by mainstream media, a trend documented here and much fretted about by authors, reviewers, and publishers. As an author, I knew about this. But who thought I could be part of the solution? Well, Paul Bogaards, a Glen Ridge resident, avid Baristanet reader and executive at Knopf, did. In mid-September, he invited me to a lunch with representatives from the Association of American Publishers... continued...

Topics: Audio/Visual, Best Practices, Financial, Marketing, Participation
Tagged: baristanet, book reviews, hyperlocal, knopf, video

Placeblogger 2.0: Taking Local to the Next Level

Lisa Williams
2:52 AM | bio | Comments: 0

Placeblogger launched on January 1, 2007. Done on a shoestring budget using open source tools, Placeblogger let people find and see the large and growing number of placeblogs -- weblogs devoted to a particular geographic community. Placeblogger's origins can be traced back to a lunch in an Italian restaurant in San Francisco, in June of 2006. I was seated with Jay Rosen of Pressthink and Dan Gillmor, author of We The Media and director of the freshly-minted Center for Citizen Media. Jay asked me, "How many blogs like yours do you think there are?" And, just pulling a number out,... continued...

Topics: Best Practices, Technology
Tagged: citizen journalism, hyperlocal, placeblogger

Three Ideas About Citizen Journalism and Web 2.0

Lisa Williams
11:51 PM | bio | Comments: 0

"Is the Zapruder film citizen journalism?" Amy Gahran, 2005 To paraphrase Dave Winer, "You'll make more money because of your blog than from your blog." But read the whole thing. The net rewards narrow comprehensiveness -- " everything about something. Listen to Brewster Kahle, who runs the Internet Archive.... continued...

Topics: Best Practices, Technology
Tagged: blogging, citizen journalism

What is the Knight News Challenge About?

Lisa Williams
10:20 PM | bio | Comments: 1

Hello World! Seems fitting to open this new space with this traditional greeting, used by humans upon first interaction with a new computing environment. My name is Lisa Williams, and along with 23 others writing on this blog, I am one of the winners of the Knight 21st Century News Challenge. I pause here, because if there is one thing that blogging has taught me, it is to distinguish what I know from what I just think I know. When I don't, well, that's what my friend and fellow blogger Shimon Rura calls "self-teaching through shame" kicks in in the... continued...

Topics: Philosophy, Technology
Tagged: knight, news, technology