We all know that words carry power. A person’s word choice can make or break a conversation, a motto, or even a simple salutation. Seeing GitHub taking action with word choice, I decided to replace the default branch of this website’s repo from master to main.
Lede, Alley’s platform for journalism startups, is our answer to scaling the technology needed by news organizations.
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.
A spectre is haunting the open source CMS community—the spectre of Medium.
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
A few months ago, this Hacker news item sparked a lively and—fittingly, for a discussion about this topic—asynchronous discussion about the role of group chat systems in open source projects and distributed companies. At Alley, we use Slack. We’re very happy with it, and it’s a really important venue for the expression of our company culture.
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
We’re proud to support some of our favorite media and technology conferences like SRCCON , ONA , and WordCamp NYC – just to name a few. Over the course of the year, we sponsor roughly one event per month, and we consider proposals from many more than that. To all of those event organizers, we have something to say:
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
In a recent episode of It’s All Journalism, director of product development Josh Kadis explained how Alley Interactive’s team of media technologists are helping digital publishers adapt and innovate. The podcast highlights media professionals and their take on the state of journalism.
These are a few points I’ve been thinking about since the Online News Association 2014 conference wrapped up. They’re based on conference sessions, conversations at our booth at the Midway and my own experience as a newsroom developer. 1. A little bit of data never hurt anyone. NPR and the Guardian demoed analytics dashboards they’ve created
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
At Alley Interactive, we work with a lot of media product startups. We build big websites for content publishers such as NYPost.com, NewRepublic.com, and KFF.org, to mention a few. We’re the team that takes all the inputs — designs, integrations, CMS backend, hosting platform — and turns it into a live site. This is a fun (and sometimes scary) position to be