I’ve noticed a trend among newspapers starting to hire out their high-end tech work recently rather than keeping, training or hiring staff members with those skills. It’s interesting in this time of hyper backpack journalism, when staffers are already juggling written stories, videos, audio slideshows and more, highly-specialized staff members skilled deep in one area are becoming rare.
The most recent example I’ve seen is the LA Times Primary Tracker which was built by Bird Branch, a funky Flash design agency.
Times are lean for many papers and finding high-end talent is hard to do (especially at the rates newspapers tend to pay).
There are several high tech opportunities newspapers might consider freelancing out:
- Flash development – Mad skills cost buckets of money that newspapers don’t want to pay for a full time employee. Perhaps paying for 1/20th of an employee, only when needed on special projects would suit the tight business model better?
- Data projects – Everyone and their freaking brother is trying to hire data programmer-producers now to copy Gannett’s Data Universe type sites.
- Design – There’s a billion web designers out there, perhaps its time to get some fresh ideas into newspaper design? Could it hurt?
- General functionality programming and development – Social media juggernaut Digg was originally created using Elance for $200. What cool ideas could you fast track to reality before Google or a start up does?
Some of these high-end tech disciplines are thought by some to be the holy grail that will save the business. But that’s not necessarily true, there’s no one magic silver bullet yet and some of the zeal for these areas from non-tech people is rather pie-in-the-sky, as Mindy McAdams alluded to earlier in the week discussing Flash and how ga-ga people are about it. (I gotta give her a big high five for being honest and advocating a reasonable approach to using flash. She wrote the book on Flash journalism, so she could obviously benefit from fueling the Flash fire sale at newspapers.) As Mindy advocated and I’ve tried to preach to countless people that have approached me and asked them to teach them Flash in 15 minutes –Flash is a huge program and can take a long time to develop a skilled staffer from scratch that consistently does cutting edge work. It takes discipline, time and lots of experience to do very well.
So perhaps this new model of high tech freelancers filling the gaps could help catapult papers’ online storytelling into the new age, while balancing stock holders demands for high profit (as uncool as that may be to say or rationalize).
There’s a lot of opportunities and agencies popping up around the country doing awesome work and filling the niche of high end storytelling for media outlets: Brian Storm’s Mediastorm, Ken Harper’s Iron Clad Images, Jayson Singe’s Neon Sky, Second Story, Terra Incognita, etc.
And for those of you interested in building your own agency, there are copious opportunities for freelancers to find tech gigs:
I think this can be a symbiotic relationship for both parties – papers and freelancers/agencies. The freelancer/agencies get more work, more freedom, don’t have to work in the traditional newsroom and get to avoid the cubicle “Office Space†life. Newspapers can combat their brain drain, get to do cool projects quickly and perhaps get some fresh, non-traditional ideas about information and storytelling in their newsrooms.
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Nerd in Chief Note: This post is part of a new ‘blog carnival‘ thing I’m trying out. Read more about the celebration of journalism blogs and check out other members in this online magazine of sorts at CarnivalOfJournalism.com
Founding Members:
- Views on News Biz- Adrian Monck
- Andy Dickinson
- Common Sense Journalism – Doug Fisher
- Journalism Iconoclast – Patrick Thornton
- Journerdism – Will Sullivan
- Online Journalism Blog – Paul Bradshaw
- ScribbleSheet Blog – John Ndege
December 13, 2007 at 10:23 am
I think this is just logical for many papers to do. Most papers won’t pay top Web people what they want, so they’ll never be able to get high-end Web talent. But hiring a company or freelancers to do a few projects a year just might make a lot more economic sense.
Every paper should have some good Web designers, developers and multimedia people, but a lot of work might need to be done on the outside. There are only so many hours in the day for staffers to work.
The Brain Drain is the No. 1 thing killing journalism right now. A lot of the best j-students from my school are not going into journalism. If you’re really intelligent why would you want to get into a field with so much turmoil and poor leadership?
Well, you wouldn’t. Some day I’m not sure what I am doing in the journalism world, but I’m crazy like that.
I’ve been doing freelance Web work for years with some people I know, and I’m thinking of changing my focus to building apps for newspapers. It seems like they can’t afford to hire full-time Web talent, but they still need the Web help.
December 13, 2007 at 12:11 pm
As long as newsrooms maintain adequate internal expertise in areas core to their mission, outsourcing isn’t a bad thing. (Today those core abilities include high-level web development, database skill, multimedia design and programming right alongside old-fashioned reporting skill, ad salesmanship, forklift-operating acumen, etc.)
But I think we know where this road would lead at all too many newspapers: Wholesale intellectual outsourcing. In that case, the organization cedes control of its own destiny, inasmuch as it is no longer capable of distinguishing itself from competitors.
I can’t emphasize it enough: Outsourcing does not relieve us of the need to acquire and master all the skills essential to our future. If Flash development is viewed by a newsroom as essential to its journalistic mission, it must acquire, master and continually improve that skill. Only while maintaining those abilities should an organization then consider offloading projects to individual freelancers or firms.
Newsrooms that won’t make that commitment to their core functions, that won’t invest adequately in the skills that fuel continuous innovation, simply aren’t going to make it. No amount of contract work will save them.
December 13, 2007 at 12:59 pm
As I said on my blog, I think the idea of freelance developers and designers working on the odd project on newspapers is great. The whole idea of keeping everything in house is just not efficient and closes off access to talent.
With the unclear financial future of newspapers I wonder how long it will be before newspapers have a small core of employees then a periphery of many journalists/developers etc working on the outside contributing inwards.
December 13, 2007 at 6:43 pm
Thanks for your comments everyone!
Mark — Don’t get me wrong, I’m all about having people in house and getting the skills inside the newsroom. Amen.
But if it comes down to ‘Ok, we have this awesome project we can do really poorly with a copy editor still learning how to tween shapes in Flash, he should have the actionscript skills for our primary tracker in a year.. oh crap, the election will be over’ or ‘Let’s get someone with the skills while we fast track our skilled staff members getting trained’ — I’ll pick the latter every time.
Newspapers need to be nimble while they evolve, which is the fundamental challenge of ‘big’ media’s survival.
December 21, 2007 at 1:29 pm
There is definitely value in training people in the basics (showing journalists how to upload images and stories to the sites, teaching them how to use multimedia equipment), but when it comes to creating innovative tools for a website, it’s not a bad idea to look outside to freelancers and/or agencies.
Another site to add to your list, btw, is oDesk (http://www.odesk.com), which offers a way to pay freelancers by hour, allowing for longer-term professional relationships.
~Michelle
oDesk.com