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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

#51

Post by skybrian »

slig wrote: post #23
Analemma_ wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure they could run a hosted blog, it's probably a deliberate decision by their tech team to seem cool and hip by posting on Medium, because that's the in thing right now for developer blogs. (Note: I'm not dissing them, I know a very talented developer who works there and says he has a great team)

> because that's the in thing right now for developer blogs. Which is bizarre. The comments section of tech blogs are a great place to discuss and ask questions, and the support for comments on Medium is abismal, looks like they deliberately made it suck.

I think Hacker News does a better job of this, and so here we are.

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

#52

Post by ktpsns »

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?

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 higher aims in markup.

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

#53

Post by chc »

ax0ar wrote: post #27
jstewartmobile wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Journalism is in the toilet, so journalists end up being one-man bands. Local Gannett paper had everyone using CRTs--in 2014!!!

Not true. Presenting is part of writing. It's not separate.

I don't think the distinction is as artificial as all that. It wasn't even possible for writers to decide on presentation until DTP came onto the scene. They just typed up their articles and then the person doing paste-up created the presentation.

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

#54

Post by combatentropy »

ktpsns wrote: post #52
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?

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 textarea. They used to do these on typewriters after all. Newspaper articles traditionally lacked anything but plain text. No bold, italics, or subheadings.

  > Markdown covers the basic text markups
  > but does not define how to format all these embedded media
  > a modern newspaper has
Traditionally the jobs were separate --- and I assume they still are. There are the reporters, who research and write the text of the article. Then there is the layout team who lay it out, decorate it, etc. I can see how markdown would be no good for them. They would want a graphical user interface.

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

#55

Post by JasonSage »

marijn wrote: post #47
JasonSage wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just my experience: I had a rough time with ProseMirror trying to use it before it was released. It didn't use modern JS modules for a long time, the source code was a mess as far as I could tell, and JavaScript variable errors would surface with every version. Maybe the author has overcome these issues, but I'd be inclined to go with a different editor. Also, ProseMirror's architecture is extremely close to DraftJS,…

Yeah thanks for dropping some deeply outdated impressions in here. (Also not even fair—the code was never a mess and at the time it wasn't clear how ES modules would be used so using CommonJS was a completely reasonable choice.)

Impressions matter, no matter how outdated they are.

I also don't think the concept of fairness applies since I'm accounting the details of my personal experience and the conclusions I personally drew from it. Some of those are subjective (code quality) while others are purely objective (I got a lot of errors). What I infer from that may be entirely different from what you do, but that does not make your characterization of things more fair than mine.

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

#56

Post by noir_lord »

amelius wrote: post #39
smacktoward wrote: post #38

> this new story editor needs to combine the advanced features of Google Docs with the intuitive design focus of Medium This part made me sad. Imagine how much more powerful our tools could be if we didn't insist on jamming them all into web browsers!

But at least they run everywhere.

Where everywhere is some subset of browsers in the wild and often not that consistently anywhere.

I mean the web is awesome but it’s far from perfect from a programming point of view but that of course doesn’t matter for other reasons.

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

#57

Post by kaennar »

One of the most truly fascinating things I learned from my father was how early 1980s word processors were designed for the magazine he worked for. The different ways to handle fonts, screen placement, and how to include data from a local database.

It was truly an awakening to the hidden wonders of the world.

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

#58

Post by slig »

skybrian wrote: post #51
slig wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> because that's the in thing right now for developer blogs. Which is bizarre. The comments section of tech blogs are a great place to discuss and ask questions, and the support for comments on Medium is abismal, looks like they deliberately made it suck.

I think Hacker News does a better job of this, and so here we are.

On some cases, agreed. But most content posted on Medium doesn't end up here.

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

#59

Post by jjeaff »

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.

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.

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

#60

Post by wjp3 »

amelius wrote: post #41
sli wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Screen-grabber?

Crypto currency mining!

/joke

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