Snowfallgate and Startups

That said, here is the key problem that scrollkit runs into: Content management. I never saw the Snow-Fall-reproduction video, but I'm assuming it involved cutting-pasting wide swaths of the final product into its editor. For the sake of argument, let's pretend that scrollkit's replica was pixel perfect.

OK, but here's the part that scrollkit does not solve at all: how does their tool manage the actual story-creation-editing process? Most writers do their writing in a text editor (Microsoft Word), then paste it into their CMS (Wordpress for example). Multimedia developers, ultimately, do kind of the same thing...build their thing (video, JS graphic, whatever) in their dev environment, and place its representation into the CMS.

OK, that's easy enough...until the writer decides that they want to remove a paragraph, switch others around, etc. etc...In a system like scrollkit's, which as far as I can tell, is a single page template editor...the writer cannot simply just select-all-delete-copy-paste because, well, that would delete the multimedia artist's work.

That's just one logistical hurdle, and probably the most minor one. But when you try to edit this piece with several people, you are going to run into major, show-stopping, hair pulling issues. This is hard to explain to developers, because we have such things as Git, automated testing, IDE's etc....imagine working on a codebase without any of those things. That is the world of virtually most content producers...which is why we have CMS and templates in the first place.

This is all descending into pedantics...but that's precisely the issue. Content producers, if you give them a bespoke tool to create something "beautiful", will happily work 24/7 doing such things as manually kerning text, fixing paragraph widows, hand inserting links over and over, etc. etc....because they don't know of any better way to do things. They don't realize how much time of their time they're wasting into reinventing the wheel. And when a production involves multiple people with varying objectives, you will have a serious clusterfuck.

And we haven't even gotten to the part of how these bespoke feature creations are linked (not just hyperlinked) into the creator's site.

So that's my issue. scrollkit solves (if it works completely as advertised) one of the least important problems in the online publishing workflow. Which is not to say that it's useless, but the problem is that it, IMHO, is doing a massive disservice by telling people that this, the problem they focus on, is the real barrier to creating compelling journalistic features.

OK. If you showed me an advertising poster you really liked, I could fire up Illustrator and give you a decent replica in a couple of hours. Does that mean you should hire me as your new ad agency? Of course not. The actual act of piecing together a creative is tiny compared to planning it. Anyone who works in the startup industry ought to get that- the coding is often the least of your problems.

So, Scrollkit never claimed that they made a Snow Fall, they claimed that they were able to throw together a copy of it in a short time. So what? Why would that make me want to use it?

(also, fun to see that the founder of ScrollKit is no stranger to lifting UI concepts other sites have pioneered: http://codybrown.name/timeline/)

Scrollkit took just one aspect of that (frontend development) and stated "The NYT spent hundreds of hours hand-coding ‘Snow Fall.’ We made a replica in an hour."

Its outright dishonest, and devalues the great effort that others spent on it. I can understand why they are pissed.