This neat story from New York magazine details some of the newest graphic artists and programmers trying to rethink the New York Times. I'm glad someone is paying some attention to this effort because the newspaper began pulling out all stops recently. They're willing to try almost anything and I think some of the efforts are marvelous.
The article does seem to short change the history of innovation at the newspaper, a necessary side-effect of looking forward and talking about what's new. I started working with the Cybertimes group, another similar pocket of programmers and writers back in the mid 1990s. Their offices were blocks away from the old building in a non-descript office building called, of all things, the Hippodrome. We weren't really part of the main NY Times then, but then we weren't really outcasts either. Everything was too new for anyone to know the social pecking order yet.
This article led me to go back and check out some of my old pieces. They were written in Java and it was not easy to keep them running on the site. Even today, they seem creaky and a bit unstable, despite the fact that Java continues to get a good amount of attention from Sun.
The first one was a simulator of the AIDS epidemic. Steven Landsburg was flogging the idea that somehow the world would have less AIDS if everyone would be more promiscuous. It's one of those ideas that can only come out of the heads of academics that fall in love with their mathematical models.
I wanted to build a simulator that would (1) let people try out the ideas themselves and (2) poke a hole in the theory. You can still try it here.
(And I'll note that Landsburg continues to push this idea -- one that could be very dangerous to anyone who actually believes his models. I hope readers will continue to work through my simulator and make up their own mind. Just trusting some so-called expert with a blind trust in mathematical models could be very, very dangerous in this case.)
My main editor at the time, Rob Fixmer, was gracious enough to let me experiment with more simulators. I ended up building:
- One that explored Thomas Schelling's geometric explanation of segregation-- explanations that later earned him a Nobel Prize.
- Another that probed why baseball games were getting so long.
- A tool that explored how to encode messages as something completely different. This new meaning to subtext was picked up by others including the neat tool that showed how to hide information as spam.
The editors then, Rob Fixmer, John Haskins, Susan Stellin and David Gallagher, were very excited about trying anything as long as it was cool and grounded in good journalism. I remember Fixmer telling me that Lisa Napoli was going to experiment with putting video on the site, something that seemed almost impossible back then. They received the full support of the guys who were pushing the whole effort to build out the web: Rich Meislin, Bernie Gwertzman, Elizabeth Osder,and Martin Nisenholtz. I'm sure I'm leaving someone out because there were plenty of people running around the offices and the memories are fading. I'm surprised that it was more than 12 years ago that I first started writing for the group.
The effort slowly faded as the dead-tree guys caught on to what we were doing. I knew that the wide-open experimentation at CyberTimes would be changed in soon after I met some people at my sister's wedding. They told me that they saw my articles on the front page of the NY Times all of the time.
How could that be? They lived in the middle of nowhere in Massachusetts and they could only read the paper online, a novelty back in 1996. The Cybertimes front page would often include one of my nerdier stories alongside something from the dead-tree's front page.
The paper reacted very intelligently but very conservatively. The dead-tree folks created Circuits, a standalone section, and began to absorb the Cybertimes group into the paper edition. This was, I think, a bit of a promotion and a recognition that our kind of work was the future. They put their best editors on the Circuits desk and I think that Circuits filled out nicely.
The problem is that the focus on the print sapped us of the strength to tackle more cutting edge simulators and toys. Many of my How-it-works pieces required both reporting and interacting with the graphic artists (Mika Grondahl and Kris Goodfellow) who turned out very sophisticated illustrations for the dead-tree edition. After all of that work on just making it look good, there wasn't enough time or budget to make the things actually do something on the web.
As I try to keep these things running on my own website, I realize why we didn't build too many of them: they're a ton of work. It's easy to skip over difficult points in a 1200 word piece. Most readers understand. But the minimum bar for a piece of software is higher. It's got to compile and run at the very least. Broken features glare. The simulators I built were great fun, but they were too much work for the paper to support.
One of the other problems is that simulators and cool toys aren't always very efficient. A reader can skim a well-written article in 20 seconds and come away with a good understanding of the most important points. Just figuring out what the buttons on a simulator can take ten minutes. Then you've got to use it. It's practically a semester long project!
We also figured out that many topics weren't worth the simulation. Fixmer kindly spindled a number of my ideas when he saw that we would build a widget that would let people rediscover, say, that the sky was blue. Many of the revelations were just a bit too obvious and the payoff for the work was too little.
I'm grateful that the paper continues to push forward. The group running the lab upstairs is very cool and the newspaper recognizes that they're the future. (They have one of the best views in the building and real estate can speak louder than words.) They're trying things that we couldn't even dream of doing. There was too little time in the day back then and there's still too little. We're getting a better idea of what works and what doesn't, but it's clear that we're just beginning to scratch the surface of this Internet thing. Even now after 12+ years, we're just beginning to understand what else we can do with the multimedia tools.