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I finally succumbed and bought Office 2008 for the Mac, for the usual reasons - too many clients sending me Office docs with elaborate formatting which gets lost in the translation in and out of iWork. To be honest, I think Excel and Powerpoint are pretty good, although Word continues to be appalling.
But even on a Mac, Microsoft can’t help but irritate. First, the 20 minute install process. Second, the 1 GB of hard drive space needed for the software. Third, the installation of applications (Silverlight) and tools (Spanish proof-reading tools, puhleeze) which I neither asked for nor want. Fourth, the addition of Office icons to my Dock without my asking (no other software does this, and it’s just rude). And fifth, the immediate download of a 120 MB “critical update” which snarls up my machine for another quarter hour.
I’m prepared to give them a chance, but by God they make it difficult. Why do so many people and IT departments put up with this nonsense?
Setting up a team for online journalism:
Each one of these jobs might well be handled by a different person.
You’re not going to get a package of this quality from one person alone. That doesn’t mean you have to hire nine people for your team (and please note, in this case, no programmer is listed, and no database developer). Sometimes one person will be capable of doing two or three of these jobs — but please do not think one person can do this single-handedly.
Design is not the same as information graphics; every package must have a designer, even if it has no explanatory graphics.
The creation of graphics and animation requires specialized, skilled people.
Another idea I discussed with the reporter: If you hire the right kind of people for the team, then you’ll need to trust their judgment. Give them creative leeway, and they’ll lead your organization in the right direction. But if you fill up all their working hours making them churn out slideshows and timelines, then you are wasting their talent.
There’s a huge difference between running up to the digital folks and saying, “I want you to make an online thing for my story!” (and then leaving it up to them) and actually, honestly working with them and getting their input on the story — in advance. The first case is all too common in today’s newsrooms, and it’s not resulting in good online work. The second case takes advantage of the deep knowledge of online that the digital folks have — and that most of your newsroom totally lacks.
This is the second in a series of posts looking at how the mainstream news media handle “slow news.” To see what I mean by slow news, take a look at the original post, and to see how the BBC handles things, take a look at the first in the series.
To see how news media is slowing down news (if at all), I’ve taken a reference topic: British identity cards. I’ve also adopted two reference sites which provide information on this issue: the No2ID site, which is a blog-based site for the campaign group which is against the adoption of identity cards; and the Wikipedia page for identity cards. My proposition is that both of these sites are frequently updated, provide a huge amount of context, and essentially grow in value over time because of the way they are curated and edited. The BBC failed to match either site with its offering; now I’m going to look at the Telegraph, in the same way I looked at the Beeb.
I got a fair amount of questions and feedback on my Slow News post of a few weeks ago, and I wanted to develop it further.
My essential proposition is this: that news media is still focussed on the day-to-day “the river of news” rather than contextualising issues and providing information for decoding important stuff. The analogy I used in the original post was that of an object in a darkened room. Currently, most news media seek to reveal that object by shining individual beams of very bright light, in the form of news stories which are catalysed by external events, for instance a politician’s speech or an election cycle. Wouldn’t it be better if there was a way to turn the room’s ceiling light on and reveal the issue in as multi-faceted a way as possible?
I called the attempt to do this, through explanation of context and curating over time, “slow news”. I argued that Wikipedia does it best because it places a topic at a URL and adds detail and context around that subject over time, rather than placing each individual item of new information about a subject on a new URL (as a news organisation does with stories).
