There’s a tendency among some folks in the industry to see CAR and other technological tools as just that - blunt instruments. Helpful, sure, but not ultimately necessary to the task of creating journalism. And for a segment of what journalism does, that’s probably ok. When we report on people and institutions that aren’t using technology to guide their decisions or actions, then an understanding of how data is used or certain technologies isn’t a necessity.

I suppose a music critic needn’t understand much about databases, for example, but reporters covering government, business, college or professional sports, to name a few, should be able to assess their subjects the way that people inside those sectors do. And increasingly, that means understanding the use of data. Many local governments base their police staffing - who covers where - on a non-stop flow of crime data. Sports teams pour over tape, logging their opponents’ tendencies in preparation for upcoming games. Businesses are all about the numbers, too.

And then there’s politics. Winning elections these days is very often about putting together enough voters to crack 50%. There’s microtargeting based on consumer data and door-to-door canvassing so that volunteers can input demographic data into centralized servers. They’re not doing that just for fun - it’s valuable information. But if journalists can’t really grasp how organizations are using data, we’re liable to miss the effects, and thus miss some fuller explanations of events. Yes, we can rely on people to tell us what’s happening - and we should - but if data plays a big part in the life of an organization, the reporter covering it should have some basis to evaluate that role.

So how does that relate to Dave’s story about the quads? Well, after reading it, I noticed that there were some subtle bits of detail that I never would have thought to include or been able to describe as well - about how the NICU operates, the details of the births. That’s because Dave has been there with his twin boys. A parent of a child born without complications or a single person would have been hard-pressed to write as good a story. I sure wouldn’t have been able to do so.

It’s the same idea when it comes to understanding the basis for decisions that come from, at least in part, the collection and consumption of data. It’s can mean the difference between telling a story and telling a better story. I’m sure plenty of organizations that we cover would be happy to have reporters who are in the dark about these things. But that doesn’t help our readers any.

So, technology and data as a tool? Yes. But when the tools become a crucial part of the world we cover, understanding how they work and being able to use them makes us better journalists.

The first-ever DjangoCon will be held Sept. 6-7 at the Googleplex in Mountain View, Calif. The preliminary program looks incredible, and I’m sad to be missing it. My summer travels have been plenty and another West Coast trip, especially over a weekend, is a bit too much (there’s also the nagging point that I’d have to pay for it myself!). Matt Waite will be there, on a panel discussing Django in journalism, just one of the really strong sessions. If you’re a West Coast CAR person dabbling in frameworks, it’s worth checking out.

But I’m trying to do my part, beginning with a donation to the Django Software Foundation. Doing so will help pay for conferences like DjangoCon, sprints and other activities that help improve the framework, and it’s such a small thing to do considering the benefits I’ve realized from using Django. If you feel the same way, please think about supporting Django.

Caspio’s David Milliron spoke at this year’s Special Libraries Association conference at a panel organized by SLA’s News Division, which includes many newspaper and broadcast librarians. It’s easy to see why: a lot of these folks are being asked to do new things, to be more involved with their organization’s Web sites, and to do it with fewer people. Seems like a pretty good opportunity for Caspio, and I don’t fault them for recognizing that. The problem I have is that the promise of Caspio is in the short-term; no matter how many features they add (my personal favorite being the Data Sheet Find and Replace one: “You no longer need to export your table outside of Caspio Bridge for this type data modification.”), you’ll never get the flexibility and control over your apps that you do when you build your own stuff. Despite what Milliron says, there are very real and serious differences between Caspio and Web application frameworks.

Maybe that’s the real lesson that journalism folks need to heed: that the costs of learning Caspio go beyond the monthly fees and the potential cost of switching to another tool (having to re-do your existing apps). Caspio is, as Matt says, good at doing some pretty basic stuff when it comes to putting data online. But if you want to go beyond Ye Olde Data Ghettoe, you’ll have to learn some programming anyway. So why learn something that can only be used on a closed system that you have to rent? Matt’s alternative happens to be PHP/MySQL based, but he’s not going to be paying for using either of those. And if suddenly MySQL decides to charge corporate users or something equally far-fetched, he can switch to Postgres or SQLite without starting from scratch.

I realize many, many folks in newsrooms can say, “Um, pardon me, but we don’t have a Matt Wynn.” Or maybe you do, but he’s insanely busy all the time. That’s a very common situation. But the real long-term question is this: if your organization is never going to want to do anything more than put up isolated search pages serving up content that no search engine can reliably find, you’re still gonna pay every month for that privilege by using Caspio. And if you hope and plan on doing more someday, even if that’s not today, then you’ll have almost nothing to transfer to that effort by using Caspio, since one of their chief claims is that you don’t have to learn any programming to use it.

So if learning more is a part of your plan, why not spend the time learning a system that doesn’t charge you for that time? By adding Caspio experience to your resume, what real skills have you gained aside from the ability to point and click?

The problem isn’t the people. I go to the SLA conference even though it has a tangential relationship (at best) to my current job because that’s where I find a group of really smart people that span nearly every field: news, law, government, engineering, technology, health, you name it. The session topics are eclectic, interesting and well-attended. People don’t wander off much.

But the problem isn’t the business climate for news, either. At least not totally. It’s a complex situation, in which a combination of factors keep a lot of news librarians anxious about their jobs and their futures. There’s a whole new set of content to archive, dwindling staff resources to deal with and a main set of consumers - reporters and editors - who remain by and large too ill-informed about the best way to find and manage needed information.

So there’s a tendency to think that if news libraries continue to provide what newsrooms want, and do it well, that things will be ok. Yes, duties will change, and people will adapt, but fundamentally it’s pretty much the same goal: finding information and turning it into knowledge.

Except that now we as news organizations are competing with, well, pretty much anybody who wants to be a guide to information, and on multiple fronts. And while most of these new competitors should also be our consumers, they are not bound by some of the ideas that have shaped how libraries have worked.

The first, and most important in my mind, is freeing ourselves from near-total dependence on vendors. Vendors will always have a role, as there are some non-core tasks that we should rightly hand to them, and some core resources that only they can provide. But I cannot imagine how news libraries will becoming engines of innovation if they do not control, or seek to control, the tools of their trade. They can no more outsource the future than the rest of the paper can, and it’s time to consider how news libraries can produce both better tools that can lead to better products.

During a session that Jessica Baumgart and I had the privilege of speaking at on Monday, I got a question from a woman in the audience who wanted to know how it was a good thing for the industry if news librarians picked up programming skills and then got better, higher-paying jobs in IT. I answered that such an occurrence was the industry’s problem, but this is what I should have said: I encourage librarians to develop these skills precisely so that they will be better librarians, better researchers. So that they can better and more efficiently manage the ever-increasing flow of information. So that they can take control of their own futures in a way that they will not be able to do without those changes. Some will leave the news library; I did. But if we stay in the news business, we’ll still be interested in solving the problems of the newsroom. And we’ll be able to contribute in even more meaningful ways (and fail sometimes along the way).

I wrote in November 2005 about ways that news libraries could actually become innovation centers, but I didn’t go far enough. Newsrooms desperately need people who can generate and then execute new ideas - for improvements in the news process and for products, to name two areas. I heard at SLA about papers forming employee committees to discuss and propose new ideas, which is great, but what if the library was the place where you could prototype and even build out some of those ideas that involve the existing content of the paper? Those committees aren’t going to be permanent, and most news organizations can’t afford to hire an R&D department.

News librarians regularly solve problems that vex 30-year veterans of the newsroom, and they often are the source of last resort for the people who need good, accurate information. But until they can be less reactive and until they start developing their own tools, getting to Nora’s 2012 scenario will be tough.

So let’s get started. SLA has created an innovation section on its site, and it’s worth taking the time to explore. Or try this effort by a fellow librarian and developer, Daniel Chudnov of the Library of Congress. Try Python, or Ruby or another programming language. Think of a concrete task - maybe some repetitive work you have to do that you’d like to automate - and see if you can’t solve it. Maybe not the first time out, or the second, but failure is a part of innovation. Not trying is the only real failure.

• A session on controlled vocabularies in art museums featuring folks from the Getty in Los Angeles. Turns out they have several datasets that might be interesting to check out.
• Lots of emphasis on digital preservation and archiving, including a session on the MetaArchive Cooperative. Seems like a similar effort should be underway for smaller newspapers who may not be fully capable of providing a failsafe repository for their content. Maybe something that an institution like Missouri or Stanford (which develops the software used for this) could take the lead on.
• A good intro on visualization techniques from Dennie Heye, and I hope that more such sessions are on the table for next year’s conference.
• Things wrapped up with an interesting session on the future of news libraries, which deserves a lot more discussion and dissection from the News Division. I’ll have more to say on this later, rest assured.

Actually, I think it’s a good think to learn both, or as much stuff as you can, because different approaches and philosophies provide different vantage points for dealing with similar issues. Of course, it’s probably out of the question that newsroom developers can go to their IT folks and say, “This week it’s Django. Next week, Rails. After that, who knows?”

So if you have to choose, consider these factors:

1. Do you have in-house expertise in either the framework or the underlying language? If so, take advantage of that. I know I’d still be a Python moron without the near-constant guidance I got from Adrian when I worked at WPNI. I’d be more of a Ruby moron without my fellow developers at the Times.
2. Is this your first time with a programming language? Personally, I found learning Python easier than I expected and I found that learning Ruby was easier because I knew some Python. YMMV, of course.
3. Are you going to need admin apps for much of what you build? If so, then I think that makes Django more attractive, since the admin is such a nice app and it comes baked-in. (Yes, Rails has scaffolding, but it’s not designed to be a full-fledged admin out of the box.)

Here’s what you don’t have to worry about: finding developers that know either Python or Ruby. There are a good number of them, and these frameworks are fun to work with. You don’t have to worry so much about backend issues: both run fine atop MySQL, Postgres and SQLite databases. SQL Server only? Django’s not gonna be as helpful, although you could always be the person who helps make support for it a reality.

The main philosophical difference between the two that I see in practice is the configuration vs. convention thing. Django doesn’t have, for example, a recommended JavaScript library; it leaves that up to you. Rails also allows you to use pretty much whatever, but it puts Prototype out there as sort of a default that you can override. Your reaction to issues like this will depend a lot on your own personal habits and experiences. So try both (or more). See what you like. Then go with it. Just don’t forget that there are always other ways of doing things, and you can learn a lot from them.

So: Curley and Co. to Las Vegas, one of the non-secret secrets of the Web journalism world. Among the reactions?

• Patrick Thornton: “Now the real fun will begin at WPNI. He is taking his whole team with him.”
• Steve Outing: “Big ouch for WashPost, eh?”

Well, yes and no. I say this as a former WPNI employee who knows Curley and his team (we weren’t best buddies, but friendly enough). Let me also say that he and his team were always nice to me, and I admire them for doing what they do.

But to respond to Steve’s assessment, it would be a bigger ouch for WPNI if Curley’s team was more a part of the organization, but it was clear from early on that they were, if I can borrow the phrase, a pluggable app rather than deeply ingrained in the organization. Curley puts it this way: “I love The Washington Post and all that it stands for, but I probably wasn’t the best fit with the organization.”

I agree. Here’s my take: Curley probably figured out quickly that being a bomb-thrower (in the best sense of the phrase) was gonna be tougher at the Post than it was at, say, Naples or Lawrence. He couldn’t get rid of the IT staff (at WPNI, his unit was entirely separate in every way, which was the best he could do). He couldn’t make people at the paper do his bidding, although certainly they sought him out to build things, and his team did some great work. But there was a lot of pushback; some of it for the wrong reasons, some of it entirely justified.

And from the perspective of good portion of the staff of the Washington Post newspaper, this Curley guy talked a great game, but some were always a little skeptical. It’s a natural enough reaction, but at an organization that size, that’s a tough situation for anyone to overcome. So I think Curley and his team did what they could and didn’t get too attached. I can totally understand that choice, but the end result is that Curley’s departure won’t spell doom for WPNI, as his group was never really a part of the team. Will it reduce WPNI’s ability to produce some cool stuff? Absolutely. But it would hurt a lot more if circumstances were different.

Certainly there was resentment at his arrival and the attention paid to it, which Curley couldn’t have done much to mitigate. And it’s not in his nature to do so, from what I saw. He’s a very smart guy, and there’s no need to apologize for that. He had to realize that some folks wouldn’t be excited to see him, or would be jealous of his resources and ability to pick and choose projects, so his team mostly kept their heads down and did their work.

That’s the thing about bomb-throwing: it works best when you control the environment around you (think Lawrence and most likely the situation awaiting Team Curley in Vegas). Throw a bomb when you’re surrounded by people who aren’t already your allies and you risk alienating more people than you intended. I say this as someone who routinely chucked bombs during my career. It may have been slightly more effective at smaller organizations; it certainly didn’t work at the Post when I tried it, and I was wrong to do it as often as I did. I didn’t pick my spots well, and as a result I alienated people who could have been my allies.

I say this not just because Curley’s leaving, but because I see a lot of this behavior in the journalism blogging community. It’s not done with bad intentions, but it seems terribly counterproductive to me to condemn people who are facing an uncertain future and don’t know how to respond to it as people who “cannot be helped.” Shall we take them out back and shoot them, then? Once you start dividing your newsroom into people with a future and people without, imagine how much fun that’s going to be for everybody. Imagine the impact on your workplace culture.

Yeah, it sure feels good, in that revolutionary zeal sort of way, to toss some grenades over the wall. But who does it help? So much of journalism blogging is preaching to the choir that you get the sense that if rest of the industry just would get out of the way already, everything would be fine. Things are more complex than that, and it’s time we started being serious about that complexity.

May’s Carnival of Journalism question is this: “What should news organizations stop doing today, immediately, to make more time for innovation?” Which is a great academic question - because that’s pretty much what this exercise is: academic. Imagine, if you will, walking into a typical newsroom, picking out a person who has worked there for, say, 5-7 years and saying: “What you’re doing? Stop it. It’s worthless.”

What, that’s not what you meant by the question? I’m sure every newspaper veteran will see it that way, too. My response was to suggest that we work on improving existing processes rather than trying to tell people who already fear for their futures that we don’t need them to do the job they’re trained to do anymore. These aren’t abstractions that can be neatly tied up in an all-encompassing blog post; these are real people. Just because someone is not willing to get fired doesn’t mean they’re not of value. I’m sorry, but if you’re 25 and single, you have yet to understand why losing a job would be a very bad thing for you and the people who depend upon you. Let’s not approach our colleagues with a raised middle finger when there are more productive avenues.

While we’re at it, let’s not all pretend that we’re the cool kids rebelling against the man. Let’s not all assume that replacing 15-inch stories with blogs works in every circumstance. Let’s not all assume that the answers are so obvious that anyone who disagrees “just doesn’t get it.” There’s a gap, people, and talking about it only helps so much. I’d love to see more creation, more building of tools that will help us get to a better place. Advice is cheap, and worth the price in too many instances.

My intent here is not to shut people up; that’s not a good thing for anybody, either. It’s to encourage all of us to think a little longer before issuing sweeping pronouncements like “no more meeting stories” or “everyone must blog/twitter/facebook/pownce/whatever or else they’re useless.” Those are not fixes to real problems; they’re revolutionary slogans. And as revolutionaries the world over have found, revolution doesn’t always translate well once you’ve attained power. Then you have to make things work.

But most trainings are highly dependent on the instructor, and having Charles Brian Quinn was a great benefit. Yes, CBQ knows his Rails, but maybe more important was that he kept the same energetic and patient demeanor the entire week. Think about it: he was the only instructor for a class that had a wide range of backgrounds and experience, and he was unflappable from 9 am to near 11 p.m. every day. That’s pretty remarkable, and it helped make the class even better.

The class covered quite a bit of material - “as much as [Charles] could possibly cram into five days”, as the certificate says - so I don’t have any complaints about substance. One possible suggestion would be for BNR to do a brief poll of attendees to get a sense of their experiences/backgrounds, and distribute that to the class beforehand. That could help an instructor plan and would also save a few minutes on Monday morning, when we were all raring to go.

In all, I’d definitely recommend Big Nerd Ranch for its total immersion learning style. Oh, and I’m thinking of incorporating an afternoon walk into my schedule, too.