Charles Arthur has an interesting piece of post-Guardian vented frustration on his blog. His argument about developers and journalists sitting together is part-bonkers opinion and partly correct. Coders and journalists are generally working on different timeframes and newsroom developers generally don’t focus enough on friction in the tools that they are creating for journalists.
Journalists however focus too much on the deadline and the frenzy of the news cycle. I often think newsroom developers are a lot like the street sweepers who clean up after a particularly exuberant street market. Everything has to be tidied up and put neatly away before the next day’s controlled riot takes place.
The piece of the article I found most interesting was something very personal though. The central assumption that runs through Arthur’s narrative is that it is valuable to let readers pre-order computer games via Amazon. One of the pieces of work I’ve done at the Guardian is to study the value of the Amazon links in the previous generation of the Guardian website. I can’t talk numbers but the outcome was that the expense of me looking at how much money was earned resulted in all the “profits” being eaten up by cost of my time. You open the box but the cat is always dead.
Similarly Arthur’s Quixotic quest meant that he spent more money in developer’s time than the project could ever possibly earn. Amazon referrals require huge volumes to be anything other than a supplement to an individual’s income.
His doomed attempt to get people to really engage with his idea really reflected the doomed nature of the idea. British journalism favours action and instinct and sometimes that combination generates results. Mostly however it just fails and regardless of whom is sitting next to whom, who can get inspired by a muddle-minded last-minute joyride on the Titanic except deadline-loving action junkies?
Echo One 