September 16, 2008

New York Times releasing document viewer, missing the point

E-media Tid­bits is report­ing that the New York Times is releas­ing an open-​source doc­u­ment viewer.

To be fully buzz­word com­pli­ant it’s both built in Ruby on Rails and there’ll be Amazon EC2 instances avail­able. (Actu­ally the EC2 instance is kind of a neat way to dis­trib­ute software…)

While I’m sure this will set off a storm of jour­nal­ists a-blogging’ about how awe­some this is, and how much of a public ser­vice this will be I feel com­pelled to call bull­shit on that.

Come on! In a world where I can easily find more infor­ma­tion than I can ever pos­si­bly use does the public really need more access to raw infor­ma­tion.

We’re drown­ing in infor­ma­tion. What a great deal of users are look­ing for is con­text, analy­sis and fil­ter­ing of that information.

To con­clude I’ll drop in an entire appro­pri­ate, and com­pletely gra­tu­itous, Jon Stew­art clip that exem­pli­fies what I’d like to see more of from journalists:

Filed under: Journalism,Programming,Technology

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  • Aron Pilhofer

    Hi Chris, and thanks for the feedback.

    Inter­est­ing take on this. I guess we dis­agree on the ques­tion of whether the public should have more access to raw source doc­u­ments, which are often quite dif­fi­cult to find at your aver­age news​pa​per.com and tend to be a fairly lousy user expe­ri­ence when you can find them.

    Iron­i­cally enough, the whole thing came up at ONA (it wasn’t part of the pre­sen­ta­tion) because a person in the audi­ence who runs a news blog in New York saw a ver­sion of the doc­u­ment viewer in my slides. She asked whether it was some­thing we might make gen­er­ally avail­able, since her site was having a very dif­fi­cult time trying to get doc­u­ments online. So, there you go.

    Finally, we’re not making this just a Rails thing. We’d ulti­mately like to make ver­sions avail­able for Django, PHP and what­ever other plat­form folks want to help us out with. All open source. If you change your mind, please drop me a line. We could cer­tainly use the help!

  • http://heisel.org Chris

    Aron,

    It’s not that I think folks shouldn’t have access to even more public infor­ma­tion than they have access to today.

    My con­cern is more that jour­nal­ists will use the exis­tence of this tool to merely throw more doc­u­ments online — treat­ing it as an infi­nite stor­age device and leav­ing thought­ful analy­sis and fil­ter­ing by the wayside.

    You can sum up the cur­rent crisis in jour­nal­ism as a strug­gle to define how we can best bring value to read­ers in a dra­mat­i­cally changed media landscape.

    If jour­nal­ists use the tool as a low-​cost means to pub­lish the doc­u­ments they gather and pair that with a fil­ter­ing and analy­sis job then I think it’s a fine thing.

    My worry is more about the misuse of the tool, than the exis­tence of the tool itself.

    I’m glad to hear you’re open sourc­ing the tool, I’d love to hack away a Python version!

  • Aron Pilhofer

    Totally legit­i­mate con­cern. I could riff at some length about com­pa­nies that encour­age thought­less use of tech­nol­ogy. They in fact have busi­ness models that depend on it.

    But that’s not what we’re shoot­ing for here at all. If we are for­tu­nate enough to see this thing widely adopted (far, far from a given), I think the net effect will be to improve trans­parency, remove bar­ri­ers (cost and tech­ni­cal) and encour­age more of what we as jour­nal­ists do best: fil­ter­ing and analysis.

    If it doesn’t, then, yes, we fail. I’ll drop you a note offline and we can talk about Pythoniz­ing it.

  • http://heisel.org Chris

    Aron,

    I fig­ured y’alls heart was in the right place, I guess was in a “cautionary tale” mood when I blogged about it :-)

    About Pythoniz­ing it, that sounds great!