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Comment by jbob2000 | Hacker News Reader

jbob2000

Whew, what a gross way to over-engineer a text editor. If the NYTimes structured themselves like a dev team, they could use common sense tools to get much better results.

Why is the journalist responsible for how it's presented? Wouldn't it make more sense to have some kind of product manager or designer handle this? And why is the journalist responsible for programming the look and feel of the their article? Why not have a front end dev do that?

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The journalist doesn't only write an article, he also structures and plans how the story is going to be presented because that's also part of the job. Hiring another person in-between the article and the journalist is like hiring an extra person to only hammer a nail when there is a construction worker to do that job already.

They develop the underlying technology to let journalists do what they want without needing to hire more employees.

In industries that still make money--even ones with better software-chops than the New York Times--writing/researching an article, and presenting it, are still separate jobs--and for good reason! They require orthogonal skillsets and a decent amount of time and hands-on experience if you want a professional result.

No one is "only" hammering a nail here.

Business choices, perhaps, aimed at reducing costs by reducing editors and moving more responsibility to reporters. See https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/29/business/media/new-york-t...

Journalism is in the toilet, so journalists end up being one-man bands. Local Gannett paper had everyone using CRTs--in 2014!!!

Not true. Presenting is part of writing. It's not separate.

A lot of tech people don't get this. You see this in web design, where they think HTML and CSS are separate domains. They think CSS is just pretty effects.

Style can convey as much information as text.

Not true that journalism is in the toilet?

My wife was, and all of her friends still are, journalists. They constantly worry and complain about all of the tasks that were once the domain of trained professionals--photographers, editors, designers--being put on the journalist due to budgetary constraints.

I don't think the distinction is as artificial as all that. It wasn't even possible for writers to decide on presentation until DTP came onto the scene. They just typed up their articles and then the person doing paste-up created the presentation.

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