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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

#81

Post by 1wheel »

jopsen wrote: post #48

If you have professional writers why not just teach them markdown and git? Instead of spending engineering $$$ building, maintaining and operating a complicated editor?

git isn't great for quickly writing and editing text. In response to breaking news, it isn't unusual to have two people making changes to the same paragraph at the same time. That's a recipe for messy merge conflict in git.

On the graphics desk we know how to use git— we use it for js/css—but still write words in google docs.

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

#82

Post by forapurpose »

Phrodo_00 wrote: post #19

This isn't even a test editor. It's closer to a web publishing tool. The article also didn't talk about the normal text editor challenges like the way the text is stored in memory and modified.

Agreed. It feels odd to read an article from a developer who doesn't know the terminology. Vim is a text editor because it edits strictly text content and not other media or presentation. Oak is a 'desktop' publishing app if not a CMS; it's purpose is to handle multimedia and presentation, as well as document review.

(At least that's how I understand text editors; maybe I'm the ignorant one.)

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

#83

Post by chrisweekly »

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.

That's kind of outrageous. Esp since the nytimes webdev team has generally done such a bang-up job w/ compelling UX.

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

#84

Post by parvenu74 »

zellyn wrote: post #18
lambda wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ProseMirror, the underlying editor they are using, is: https://prosemirror.net/

Yep. That was clear from the article.

I suspect that NYT will contribute quite a bit back to ProseMirror out of enlightened self-interest but not give away the secret sauce that make Oak a competitive advantage for them. This is REAL freedom in software: without the ability to build a closed-source, for-profit business it won't succeed. I'll take MIT/BSD/Apache over something with a herpes license (GPL/AGPL) any day.

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

#85

Post by mdigan »

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.

If you're looking for a backend role, we're also hiring in New York Times Data Engineering--application engineers, data engineers, and database reliability engineers:

https://nytimes.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/Tech/job/New-Yor...

https://nytimes.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/Tech/job/New-Yor...

https://nytimes.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/Tech/job/New-Yor...

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

#86

Post by philcockfield »

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.

I really like Slate....but the ability to do collaborative editing is relatively new.

Have you done anything with collaborative editing with Slate? If so, how are you finding it?

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

#87

Post by geofft »

parvenu74 wrote: post #84
zellyn wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. That was clear from the article.

I suspect that NYT will contribute quite a bit back to ProseMirror out of enlightened self-interest but not give away the secret sauce that make Oak a competitive advantage for them. This is REAL freedom in software: without the ability to build a closed-source, for-profit business it won't succeed. I'll take MIT/BSD/Apache over something with a herpes license (GPL/AGPL) any day.

Can we leave the Slashdot-quality trolling about licensing back in the previous millennium where it belongs?

There are, of course, successful projects licensed under the GPL and AGPL (Linux comes to mind), many of which have for-profit businesses; there are plenty of people with different priorities about what "REAL freedom" is. And calling the licenses that match their priorities "herpes licenses" is unlikely to convince them.

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

#88

Post by jstewartmobile »

ax0ar wrote: post #26
jbob2000 wrote: post #9

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…

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…

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.

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

#89

Post by combatentropy »

acdha wrote: post #71
combatentropy wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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.

Well yes, I think so, for these reasons:

1. Most articles have simple layouts, like this one, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/12/us/politics/trump-trans-p...

2. Most reporters were journalism majors, which teaches research, interviewing, and writing. Graphic design is a separate discipline. It is possible for one person to be good at both, but rare.

3. Companies tend to cut up work, especially big companies, like the New York Times.

4. Complex articles like this one, https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/entertainment/v..., aren't tossed over the wall. But that doesn't mean that one person did it all either. I'm sure there was back and forth between the writer and designers, and likely an editor oversaw it all.

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

#90

Post by [deleted] »

acdha wrote: post #71
combatentropy wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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.

[deleted]
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