High tech freelancers help fill the gaps in newspaper new media teams

Knitted symbiotic relationship Photo courtesy melilab at Flickr

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.

—

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:

About this entry

You’re currently reading “High tech freelancers help fill the gaps in newspaper new media teams,” an entry on Journerdism

Published:
12.13.07 / 1am
Category:
everything, media changes, multimedia, programming, web design
Tags:
, , , ,