"Laziness: The quality that makes you go to great effort to reduce overall energy expenditure. It makes you write labor-saving programs that other people will find useful and document what you wrote so you don't have to answer so many questions about it." ~ Larry Wall, creator of Perl
When news breaks and you're new to a beat, it can be especially stressful to hunt down sources and pull together copy under deadline. Veteran reporters, on the other hand, often have (slightly) lower stress levels. They typically have a wealth of domain knowledge to dip into. They're intimately familiar with the trends and key players on their beat, as well as documents that can provide background or help answer questions. They have a stable of human sources who can speak to an issue or point them toward other, more relevant sources.
In a similar vein, data journalists and newsroom developers just starting out often work in ad hoc, "messy" ways. This is natural when you join a team, learn a new technology, etc. But over time, these technical-minded journalists build up a stable of tools and resources to help themselves and their colleagues work at the speed of news.
They can "identify reporting patterns that come up a lot and develop tools that help reporters handle these tasks more efficiently," wrote Tiff Fehr, an NYT interactive news developer, in a story about a tool that lets reporters sift through large document dumps. "The job is part coach and part coder, listening for pain points and evaluating possible solutions, whether those fixes take the shape of work flow adjustments or custom software."
Newsroom coders such as Tiff make a virtue of "laziness." Here are a few examples of their work:
- Content publishing
- Data analysis
- Data-gathering web admins
- Document handling
- News tips
- Storybots
- Workflow automation
In this course we'll dip into this culture of automation by using Datakit, an open source tool designed to streamline data project workflows on the command line.