The Role of IT in Newspapers

It's no secret by now that print publications are struggling. We've seen many metro newspapers close down or reduce to three day a week printing, and community newspapers are downsizing en masse.

It's the world we live in. People want their news immediately, not 16 hours later when the presses wind down and the newspaper has been placed on their doorstep.  It's the instant gratification mixed with a sense that we can learn all we need to know about the important things in our lives in 140 characters or less.

More and more people report they are turning to Facebook and Twitter as their main source of information. That, my friends is a very dangerous thing. In 2011 when the Moment Fire gripped Southeast Arizona and evacuated homes, a Facebook page was launched almost immediately to inform those effected of the dangers. The problem is, the news was mostly unreliable. People evacuated homes and sought refuge in areas that weren't in any threat zone, because people reported rumor and myth online.

Yes, it was a source of "news", but it wasn't trusted news. The newspaper I work for was openly lambasted by local readers for not posting evacuation notices fast enough. Again, the problem wasn't the speed of the information, it was the reliability. They were upset we didn't post evacuations in places that weren't being evacuated, but they had heard on Facebook their house was about to burn down.

It all culminated when a local competing on-line only news source reported one of the largest gas stations in town had exploded in the fire. This gas station sits just down the road, hundreds of feet, from one of our largest elementary schools. Parents flocked to the school fearing for their children's safety creating a large traffic jam that even emergency vehicles couldn't clear quickly.

This traffic jam was along the main route that firefighters were using to put out the real flames, which were in an empty field on Fort Huachuca, and the gas station was in no danger at all, a large four line bypass separate the two. It would have taken 60 foot flames to jump that road, a road that was now packed with terrified parents, hundreds of cars, and stood in the way of emergency workers who needed to make sure the flames didn't become dangerous to an entire military base.

The misreporting of news online has become a dangerous problem to society, and it is still the job of the traditional newspaper to get the story right, not spread fear and chaos, and report responsibly. But it's also our job to report as quickly as possible, to inform, and to quiet the fears being spread by the uninformed.

The role of IT in newspapers today has changed quite a bit. We are no longer just here to fix your printer, or calibrate your monitor. We have become a source of the information flow. It is our job to drive new technology that can provide a community with quality information quickly and easily.

My newspaper won a national newspaper website award for the work we did during the Monument Fire because of our use of email alerts, SMS messaging, and social media to help inform the community. We used digital maps of evacuation zones, and hosted live chats with our reporting staff to give people the most up to date and sourced news that we could. And a lot of that fell directly in the lap of IT... me.

When Gabrielle Giffords was shot, I was called into the office early on a Saturday morning to help direct the flow of information. Our reporters and editors were busy trying to gather the news and verify it through multiple sources, and it became my job to get it online, to send out SMS alerts to the community, and to keep web servers that were under an amazing amount of stress up and running.

We live in Gabrielle Giffords district. This was our Congresswoman. And it was a mad house. Newspaper websites in larger cities like Tucson and Phoenix crashed under the weight of the page requests flooding in, and we became the place people could get news from. We did nearly 200,000 page views that day, when we normally do about 500,000 per month. It was a huge task to keep the information flowing, but we did it. And I think we did a damned fine job.

IT people in newspapers are no longer just the nerd sitting in a cold server room watching bits of data move from disk to disk. We are no longer just writing snippets of code to produce a better PDF. We have become the forefront of major breaking news. We are now part of the communication process, and our communities rely upon us to provide the best ad fastest news to them, from the hands of the editor, to the eyes of the reader.

In the coming years, that will become even more true. As newspapers cut back costs, we will be called upon to replace expensive legacy systems with open source alternatives that do a better job. We will be asked to integrate systems that exist independently and were never meant to work together. We will be asked to be the bandaid for the monetary bleeding, and reduce costs of hardware and software, rather than people and jobs.

We will be called upon to be MacGyver, building elegant workflows out of antiquated parts, a little duct tape, some chewing gum, and a paper clip, and to make it work better than the million dollar solutions smaller newspapers can no longer afford. There will be crappy photos taken on smartphones from reporters trying to get the story, and we will be asked to make them look good in print, converted to CMYK, and blown up to a front page story.

This is our task, and it's an important one, because the newspaper must survive in order for a community to be informed. There must still be a place of trusted information, both online and in print, for the future of intelligent and informed people all over our country.

We will work with our sales departments, our editorial departments, our circulation departments, and our production departments to improve the quality of our paper, but we will also be the front lines of major breaking stories, quarterbacking the plays and making sure we not only get it right, but we get it quickly.

If the Monument Fire taught me anything, it was that I am not just a code monkey and server mechanic any more. I am a webmaster, a photographer, a communications specialist, and often, the first point of contact for a very scared group of people who need a voice of reason.

And it feels pretty good to be able to be that person for my community.