Snowfallgate and Startups

nice post

I'll start out and say that the NYT's legal department was off the mark here...but they've been off-the-mark (i.e. heavy handed) in a lot of incidents...as far as I've seen, the journalists and developers who were part of Snow Fall didn't seem to give a shit, so maybe someone at NYT was like, "Well, someone do something".

So while NYT legal may be a bunch of blowhards, it's hard to say that they're quixotic takedown effort has any actual effect on journalistic innovation.

There is something highly off-putting about how scrollkit has carried itself in this. It's already been well pointed out that the "hundreds of hours" in making Snow Fall did not involve hand-coding, and that the barrier for storytellers to create "Snow Fall" like productions is not putting together the HTML/CSS, but actually making the content and doing the design work. And I say that as someone who has made a living building HTML and CSS.

Because if the substantial work of building a Pulitzer Prize level feature takes just an hour...then logic would seem to dictate that in about 5-10 hours, any given scrollkit user could create something quite epic (if not Pulitzer worthy), and yet, browsing through scrollkit's few exsmples in their Twitter feed, I don't see anything that comes close to delivering on the impressive design or content that Snow Fall had. And I'm not belittling them...that's not their fault. "Snow Fall" productions are hard, and the HTML/CSS editor used to create them is almost entirely tangential to their quality.

Do we really need to discuss the merits of scrollkit's purported claim, that "templates" are holding content creators back? Templates exist because in serious publishing businesses, there are not the resources to re-invent the HTML wheel, and templates as defined by CMSes do very important things, like represent content in a manageable, portable format. Anyone here who has happily moved their blog to Jekyll/Octopress, I believe, would agree with me. In any case, if we take scrollkit's philosophy to its logical conclusion, then the days of Flash and bespoke UI/UX were the glory days of content. And I'm being sincere here, some Flash apps/portfolio pages were amazing and have not yet been replicated at the HTML5 or even iOS level. And yet, Flash as a canvas didn't quite work out...

The reason why I'm going off on a rant here is that, unmentioned in the OP, is that scrollkit got $200,000 from the Knight Foundation in an initiative to promote journalistic innovation in the long battle to making online journalism viable and vibrant. (DocumentCloud, which most HNers might recognize as the progenitor of Backbone.js, Underscore.js, and several other useful Jeremy-Ashkenas-inventions, was also a Knight-funded initiative.) So there's something a little galling about how scrollkit, which was given 6 figures to aid journalism, is instead raising publicity for itself by dumbing down the already muddled discussion on content management.

And also, its exploitation of the emotions and confusion in the continuing debate over intellectual copyright is also a little annoying.

I disagree. There is a set of great storytellers, and a set of great developers, but these rarely overlap; an individual who embodies both attributes is vanishingly rare, and only elite organisations (e.g. the NYT) can afford to employ teams containing a critical mass of both talents. As a result, there are going to be lots of great storytellers out there who are "technologically constrained"; the one thing preventing them from creating the next Snow Fall is the fact that they simply don't know how to work with the technology necessary to do so, and nor does anyone they work with.

You might argue that these great storytellers could tell their stories without recourse to new technology, and you'd be right. But the same would apply to any new technology at any point in time. What Scrollkit is doing is what software developers have always done: made it possible for non-developers to do stuff that, previously, only those with direct access to talented developers could do.

Well it's not true that there was no existing relationship. And I'm not sure what anyone gains by your wild speculation.