Since April, our team at Alley has been working hard in tandem with the team at Civil to deliver an awesome publishing platform to its first fleet newsrooms. We’re hoping what we’ve built will boost many more new businesses than the dozen or so we’ve pushed to market so far. At Alley, we’re all about pushing the boundaries of journalism business models, so we were psyched to get a chance to participate in a bold experiment like Civil.
Jotham Sederstrom’s public reaction to being fired cold by the New York Daily News for appearing to publish plagiarized content is remarkable in its candor and its acceptance of blame, but belies the pressing issue at hand for those of us who build news websites. Jotham would still be toiling away for his teetering employer if not for a harebrained
As software developers, we routinely must maintain code that we did not build in the first place. Maybe the original developers left the company or maybe they were consultants whose contract ended. Our tendency is to blame these developers for whatever we dislike about their code to deflect criticism, apologize for defects, and gain permission
In a piece for NiemanLab about Digital First Media, Ken Doctor argues that spending on technology and development is vital to being “digital first.” But I wonder if Doctor has the correct definition of that term. A journalism operation can be “digital first” and receive very little assistance from technology teams. At its core, “digital first” is a
I understand the value of a certification to Acquia in their ecosystem, and I appreciate that they named it after their company rather than Drupal itself. It’s a play from Oracle’s book that could conceivably make the Acquia-verse larger and more integrated. It’s still disappointing, though, and not something that resonates with my opinion on where our