Saving Journalism With Flash and Java

An anonymous reader writes "New York magazine has a story about some of the flashy new ideas that are coming out of the labs of the New York Times. The piece prompted Peter Wayner to dig up some of the old Java applets he wrote to explore whether more promiscuity really stops AIDS and whether baseball can do anything to speed up the games. He notes that these took a great deal of work to produce and it's not possible to do them on a daily basis. Furthermore, they're cranky and fragile, perhaps thanks to Java. Are cool, interactive features the future of journalism on the web? Or will simple ASCII text continue to be the most efficient way for us to mingle our thoughts, especially when ASCII text won't generate a classloading error?"

saving is not the right adjective

[girlintraining]

So far the media's use of flash and java has been a major reason for the development and wide-spread use of browser plug-ins to disable those technologies. I reject your reality and substitute my own.

Whoa there!

[MarkusQ]

Or will simple ASCII text continue to be the most efficient way for us to mingle our thoughts, especially when ASCII text won't generate a classloading error?

If you think plain ASCII text can't cause a system failure on loading, you need to spend some time grading undergraduate essays. Or reading corporate memos. Or, for that mater, some of the more egregious /. article summaries.

-- MarkusQ

P.S. If you think plane ASC 2 text can't on loading cause failure off your system, need too spend sometime grading undergraduate written by essays. Ore reading corporate-memos. Ore, four that matter, sum of teh more eggreigious article sumaries on this cite.

It can be done right.

[Ilyakub]

I've seen very helpful Flash visualizations on news websites that helped understand the story better.

For example, this interactive map [latimes.com] of drug war related deaths in Mexico is very well done. It doesn't just clarify the conflict, but encourages the reader to analyze and research the topic independently in addition to linearly reading the text of an article.

Just reading an article, listening to the radio or watching a news program often gives the illusion of learning and understanding new information, whereas in reality very little is retained.

Innovative and interactive ways of presenting information solve this problem.

Re:Cranky and fragile, due to Java?

[SpuriousLogic]

Java is cranky and fragile? I guess that is why it is used for backend trading applications and banks across the world. 100's of trillions of dollars is just fine to be handled by a cranky and fragile language. Thank god for perl and their fans for such a robust language that it can be used sometimes for partially stable webpages.

Re:ebooks

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000FI73MA/ [amazon.com]
# Top U.S. newspapers including The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post; top magazines including TIME, Atlantic Monthly, and Forbes--all auto-delivered wirelessly.
# Top international newspapers from France, Germany, and Ireland; Le Monde, Frankfurter Allgemeine, and The Irish Times--all auto-delivered wirelessly.
# More than 1000 top blogs from the worlds of business, technology, sports, entertainment, and politics, including BoingBoing, Slashdot, TechCrunch, ESPN's Bill Simmons, The Onion, Michelle Malkin, and The Huffington Post--all updated wirelessly throughout the day.

Re:Can technology aid journalism?

[nsayer]

I read the baseball story linked in the article. The Java app allowed users to see the numbers for themselves,

No it didn't. It allowed me to see the BBOD and force-quit Safari is all.

An all-Flash newsmagazine

[colfer]

Here's a pretty well-funded, all-Flash newsmagazine published by real journalists: http://www.flypmedia.com/ [flypmedia.com]

Re:Can technology aid journalism?

[kencurry]

I pay for wsj.com; have for several years now. I have noticed a steady decline in the quality of the journalism, with a concomitant rise in ads, "movies", etc. I just want a reliable news source that I can read anywhere, including my iphone. I will pay for it - is that so hard?

But for the love of god, I do not want annoying prompts to update java or flash. ever. period.

Re:Can technology aid journalism?

[Enderandrew]

It is my professional opinion that Java sucks dirty-donkey-parts.

Re:Cranky and fragile, due to Java?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually this is quite easy to do if you want a microbenchmark, all you need to do is perform a calculation in C++ in a cache-unfriendly manner and then translate it literally to Java, which will usually outperform it because the JVM shuffles the memory around itself.

IIRC, performing a calculation on two decently long arrays of floats, where you're accessing one element from each array each iteration of the for loop will do the trick - it trashes the cache in C++, but Java slices the arrays up in memory based on the access pattern that the JIT observes, so the thing goes fairly fast. Use -server mode, though, the client JVM is a piece of shit. You also may need to learn how to trick the JVM into not optimizing your entire microbenchmark away, but that's another story altogether...

Sunlight

[rhinokitty]

Getting too pedantic about what is and isn't journalism leads the discussion away from focusing on the great tools that are being developed to help the average citizen understand the powers that be (government, corporations, etc..).

The Sunlight Foundation [sunlightfoundation.com] has funded a lot of really great web tools, widgets and applets that show how congress works, track money donated to candidates, expose corporate corruption, and many other areas of coverage that the film noir investigative journalist types might still consider their turf.

Anyone can do good journalism, anyone can do bad journalism. I think talking about who is helping to expose and disseminate new information that is in the public interest (news) is more important that talking about the news industry as such.