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Building a Text Editor for a Digital-First Newsroom

open.nytimes.com

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Re: Building a Text Editor for a Digital-First Newsroom

#71

Post by acdha »

combatentropy wrote: post #54
ktpsns wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because professional writers are not professional coders. Markdown covers the basic text markups but does not define how to format all these embedded media a modern newspaper has. Just to give an example: Inspect the syntax of wikipedia, which is the MediaWiki wikitext ( https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikitext ) language. It is simple and therefore Wikipedia pages are rather simple. I expect the NYtimes to have highe…

>> why not just teach them markdown and git? I myself am surprised they don't just use markdown. Git is another story. > writers are not professional coders. But I have heard of writers clinging to old versions of WordPerfect, which were not WYSIWYG. They preferred the keyboard shortcuts to clicking around with the mouse. Furthermore if you're just writing the text of the article, you don't even need markdown, just a…

> Traditionally the jobs were separate --- and I assume they still are.

Is this really a good assumption? Journalists are making complex documents with central interactive features and lots of data visualization. It seems a lot like classic waterfall thinking to assume that reporters could perfectly envision that and toss it over the wall for a separate team.

Re: Building a Text Editor for a Digital-First Newsroom

#72

Post by flukus »

tedmiston wrote: post #61
venning wrote: post #4

Data Warning: 100 MB. Viewing the header illustration for more than a few seconds crashes my iPad Safari tab. Scrolling until it is off the viewport prevents this. EDIT: Dev Tools reports 74.8 MB transferred with an ad blocker. The illustration is a single 69.2 MB gif. EDIT: 101 MB in total when you scroll to the bottom. Three more gifs: 18.1 MB, 7.1 MB, 4.7 MB.

Instapaper Text view reduces it to a slightly more reasonable 41 MB. https://www.instapaper.com/text?u=https%3A%2F%2Fopen.nytimes... (This may require a free Instapaper account to view.)

UBlock brings it down to 204KB because the images are on a CDN. Being on a CDN is probably why the author is oblivious to the file sizes.

Re: Building a Text Editor for a Digital-First Newsroom

#73

Post by dingo_bat »

venning wrote: post #4

Data Warning: 100 MB. Viewing the header illustration for more than a few seconds crashes my iPad Safari tab. Scrolling until it is off the viewport prevents this. EDIT: Dev Tools reports 74.8 MB transferred with an ad blocker. The illustration is a single 69.2 MB gif. EDIT: 101 MB in total when you scroll to the bottom. Three more gifs: 18.1 MB, 7.1 MB, 4.7 MB.

There's something wrong with your iPad or safari itself. My 2 year old phone has no problems keeping up. It is incredibly stupid to have a 69 MB gif though.

Re: Building a Text Editor for a Digital-First Newsroom

#74

Post by slobotron »

zem wrote: post #40
AJRF wrote: post #36

I'd love to work for this engineering team. Their tech blog and github is full of interesting projects.

the BBC sounds like it has a really good tech team too. wonder what it is about newspapers that leads to this sort of tech culture.

An excellent profiler for perl, NYTProf [0], came out of New York Times. It's still actively developed and still kicks ass - outputs easy to grok flame graphs that you can click around on to zero into any statement. More than just finding bottlenecks, I find it useful to understand workings of new codebases...

[0] https://metacpan.org/pod/Devel::NYTProf

Re: Building a Text Editor for a Digital-First Newsroom

#75

Post by njsubedi »

evrydayhustling wrote: post #69
tedmiston wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure why you're getting downvoted. This appears to be an evolution of WYSIWYG tools to me, which I wouldn't categorize as a text editor either — more like a word processor. FWIW ProseMirror does not bill itself as a text editor: > An ideal content editor ... bridg[ing] the gap between Markdown text editing and classical WYSIWYG editors. > It does this by implementing a WYSIWYG-style editing interface for document…

Every comment that remotely questions this article is getting downvoted, rather than discussed. Lame.

I just realized this too. No wonder many of the NyTimes journalists are here today.

Re: Building a Text Editor for a Digital-First Newsroom

#76

Post by [deleted] »

zawerf wrote: post #63
manigandham wrote: post #5

Cool, but it's yet another case of re-engineering the same thing. (edit: its not entirely new). Splitting editors into an abstracted structure for finer control over data and presentation is something that's been done for a decade now in various text editors. Medium and Basecamp started similar projects and there's Mobiledoc which is trying to standardize the format. It'd be nice if all this effort focused on a singl…

It might be helpful to update your list with some feature comparisons. For example: Quill vs (CKEditor and TinyMCE, Draft, ProseMirror, Trix): https://quilljs.com/guides/comparison-with-other-rich-text-e... Slate vs (Draft, ProseMirror, Quill): https://github.com/ianstormtaylor/slate#why I personally went with Slate because I needed first-class React support but not as low level as Draft.

[deleted]

Re: Building a Text Editor for a Digital-First Newsroom

#77

Post by benjaminl »

sli wrote: post #22
twothamendment wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

69 MB gif - isn't that called a video? I thought we had different formats for that.

What I find amazing is that it's that large despite only being two bits of color depth, and it's extremely short and low framerate. Where the hell did all that filesize come from?

Looks like they cut the size down some. I am seeing 10.7 MB for the GIF.

There are several reasons for why the GIF is so large that all contribute to the size. The GIF's resolution is quite large for a GIF, at 1004px by 788px, this is larger then they display it on the page. And the GIF is pretty long at 336 frames.

Since GIFs on like just about every video format except MJPEG has no interframe compression. So each frame only has to average 32 KB to make up that 10 MB (336 * 32.6KB = 10.7 MB).

This is an example of how extremely good our modern video codecs are.

[0] - https://ezgif.com/split/ezgif-4-240b758f26.gif

Re: Building a Text Editor for a Digital-First Newsroom

#78

Post by SwellJoe »

jjeaff wrote: post #59
zem wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the BBC sounds like it has a really good tech team too. wonder what it is about newspapers that leads to this sort of tech culture.

I'd say it's desperation. The traditional business model of newspapers has been upended, and the ad driven model isn't really working out that well either. So instead of doubling down and riding it to the ground, some outlets are actually innovating and making cool stuff and throwing it against the wall to see what happens.

While I agree, I wouldn't think BBC would be dealing with those same pressures, being primarily (I think?) state-funded.

Re: Building a Text Editor for a Digital-First Newsroom

#79

Post by IAmEveryone »

njsubedi wrote: post #75
evrydayhustling wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every comment that remotely questions this article is getting downvoted, rather than discussed. Lame.

I just realized this too. No wonder many of the NyTimes journalists are here today.

I just downvoted you, and I don't write for the Times. Unfortunately...

The reason this specific thread is being downvoted is that it started with nitpicking over useless semantics, and then actually managed to get worse by complaining about downvotes. Then, it got worse yet again by offering a conspiracy theory for those downvotes, instead of assuming the obvious: nobody cares.

Re: Building a Text Editor for a Digital-First Newsroom

#80

Post by albertsun »

sugarpile wrote: post #67
albertsun wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're hiring! You should apply! https://nytimes.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/Tech/job/New-York-NY/S...

Any backend openings? I've been looking to move into frontend work more but don't think my experience is there yet.

There are! We're hiring for lots of open technology jobs here https://nytimes.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/Tech

For backend specifically, on the CMS team there's this job https://nytimes.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/Tech/job/New-Yor... or a fun one with the cooking team https://nytimes.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/Tech/job/New-Yor...

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