Content marketing articles from our agency

Occasionally here at Curated Content HQ, we read a blog or article that sparks plenty of lively debate, low ball humour or lousy word plays like in the title. And sometimes the discussion turns into an opportunity to change the way the game is played.

Obviously for a blog to have the ‘tool up’ effect, it needs to pack a pretty intense message.

And it did.

For starters it called journalists ‘geeks’. Then things got really crazy with:

‘Eventually the tools of writers cease to be enough: Microsoft Word gives way to Excel, which gives way to MySQL. And then, almost without knowing it, you’re creating the tools yourself. Having conquered English, you start learning a few phrases in HTML, then PHP, then Python and Django. One day without warning, you find yourself tromping around a Git repository. And liking it. A new journo-hacker has been born.’

To save you the time of throwing that slab of text into Google, it’s written by a smart guy called Matt Thompson and first appeared on Poyter.org in October 2011. Agreed, that’s forever ago in this age of rapid acceleration of acceleration, but wow, what a point he makes. (Oh, and a Git Repository is a collection of files you probably got from GitHub, a socially collaborative coding platform).

Journalists need to be coders???

Well, as strange as that seems, we’d be lying if we said we didn’t usually already view digital content through the WYSIWG lens (old skoolers, that’s ‘what you see is what you get’ – and it means looking at you article on screen with the code thrown in) In fact, we have been known to ask our contributors to write in HTML so we can get the article published faster. Most freelancer writers and journalists today rarely baulk at the ‘Can you write in HTML?’ question anyway, given many of them are already running their own DIY media empires on Tumblr and WordPress.

News organisations are now hiring data visualizers too, (so do we) because that picture is worth way more than 1000 words. And if it’s interactive, so much the better – that story with plenty of data (facts) is just dying to be displayed on your fabulous new tablet or smartphone. Suddenly news is interactive…but could it be cool again? Judging by the number of developers teaming up with journalists to create powerful visualizations (likely to be seen and shared by more people and organizations than pure text-based articles) or journalists learning to code, via places like GitHub we’d say… yes!

This hopeful thought in itself had its origins in another interesting blog we read recently that boldly declared:

‘One in every four Americans receives their news digitally from mobile devices, which are helping to expand the consumption of journalism across multiple sources’

The impressive stat comes freshly minted The 2012 State of the News Media Report, conducted by Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. The report goes on to say that laptop and desktop computers are still the main portals for delivering digital news, but smartphones and tablets are quickly closing the gap. ‘And, mobile devices also are leading users to consume more news and for longer periods of time.’

We’ll also add (just for fun), the report found that users turned to Facebook for family and friends news and Twitter for ‘real’ news like the Arab Spring uprising and The Kardashians – but more on that in another post.

Back to the business of journalists being able to talk and think like coders. They are doing it more and more because it enables them  to collaborate with developers to create a visual story so incredibly awesome and powerful, it gets shared the world over, and other journalists borrow the code to tell their own data story. Perhaps the greatest endorsement of this type of emerging journalistic skill set comes from the old masters themselves: The New York Times and The Guardian. Both media organizations have the ultimate nod to hacker journalism: the developer blog. No wonder we’re all consuming more news on our cool new devices – it’s beautiful!

Let’s hope this gradual shift in who creates and how we consume the news sparks some robust conversation, like it did with us. It’s pretty cool, and in some ways, a lot more transparent.

At the same time, however, those Hemingway favoured Moleskin notebooks still continue to sell like hotcakes.