The tech/editorial culture clash
科技思維有助於新聞業的發展（下）
 
I was once wandering round The Guardian’s digital floor, where I was, at the time, a senior editor, when I saw a group of technologists from an engineering firm arranged in a circle, passing a rubber chicken between them. The engineers were helping with a large project, but the chicken ritual was baffling. I asked a colleague about it. “The chicken is like a talking stick,” she explained. “The developers need to know that when the chicken gets to them, they have to describe their work for the day and offer comments on anyone else’s work….otherwise they might just not be able to tell us something important.”
　
　　有一次我在衛報的數位部門徘徊，當時還是個資深編輯的我，看到一組來自工程公司的科技人員圍成一個圈子，彼此傳遞一個橡皮雞；這些工程師正在幫助衛報進行一個大型計劃，但「雞」的儀式令人困惑。一個同事告訴我：「雞就像一個說話杖」，「開發人員需要知道，當雞傳到自己手上時，拿著橡皮雞的人必須描述自身的工作內容，並對其他人的工作發表評論……不然，工程師恐怕無法將重要的事情表達出來」。
　
In a news organization, the idea that a group of colleagues would need a rubber chicken as an aid to self-expression was anathema. Journalists offered opinions freely, particularly on the subject of the digital landscape, often with little or no evidentiary basis. Working between teams of developers and journalists, it was easy to discern where the differences in culture and understanding lay. Technologists necessarily needed precision and certainty, while journalists frolicked amid ambiguity and uncertainty. What I regarded as a complete coup as an editor—launching a site in a very short time on third-party technology—made the tech team wince and say, “We should never ever do that again.” What I saw as a tactical triumph, they interpreted as a strategic disaster. While their route would have cost much less long-term “technical debt,” my route took two and a half years less to complete.
　
　　在一個新聞機構中，一組同事需要使用一個橡皮雞來自我表達是令人難受的。 記者往往能自由地提出看法，特別是在那些不太需要任何證據基礎的數位內容主題上。從開發團隊和記者團隊之間，我們很容易辨別彼此文化之間的落差；技術人員講求精確度和確定性，而記者則在模糊和不確定性之間遊離。作為一個編輯，我突然靈機一動，短時間內在第三方科技上設立一個網站，迫使科技團隊退縮和表態：「我們永遠不該再這麼做」。我所看到的是策略上的勝利，他們卻認為是戰略上的災難。雖然他們路線的成本遠遠低於長期的「技術債務」，但我的路線花了兩年半的時間才完成。
　
This cultural difference was written through every page of the now famous leaked New York Times innovation report of 2014, often in a tone of primal frustration. One anonymous newsroom contributor to the report put it thus: “We have a tendency to pour resources into big one-time projects and work through the one-time fixes needed to create them and overlook the less glamorous work of creating tools, templates and permanent fixes that cumulatively can have a bigger impact by saving our digital journalists time and elevating the whole report. We greatly undervalue replicability.”
　
　　這種文化差異可從2014年紐約時報的創新報告看出些許端倪，即便內容仍是充滿著挫折感。報告中的一位匿名新聞編輯認為：「我們傾向把所有的資源都傾注在一個大計劃上，藉一次性的修改來完成這個計畫，並忽略最不迷人的創作工具、模版及例行性的修改，這些對於我們數位記者有很大的影響，因為可以省下很多時間，並提升報導的品質。我們大大的低估了複製性所帶來的好處」。
　
Mark Hansen, who leads the Brown Institute for Media Innovation co-located at the Columbia Journalism School and the Stanford Engineering School, sees enormous opportunity in making journalism a truly interdisciplinary field. “It is a lazy line of thinking to say that journalists and technologists occupy different spaces and always will,” he says. “Those caricatures are really not useful. Engineers are incentivized to think differently, as are journalists. But plenty of engineers think like journalists, and vice versa.”
　
　　布朗媒體創新學院（Brown Institute for Media Innovation）主任Mark Hansen認為，現在是新聞學成為跨學科領域的絕佳機會，他說：「刻意區分記者和技術人員的分別是懶惰的想法」，也提及「這些嘲諷沒有多大的幫助，工程師被鼓勵以不同的角度思考，記者同樣也是。但許多工程師卻被認為像記者，反之亦然」。
　
Journalistic innovation now often means keeping pace with the largest and most agile of the social media companies. New entrants into the journalism market, like BuzzFeed, have made a point and a business of staying as close to the development of companies like Facebook as possible. Others, like Vox, have focused on making their own in-house technologies that are as good as anything Silicon Valley might produce. A new classification of newsroom jobs in “product teams” has been part of the response to this cultural friction. (Journalists of a particular generation detest the word “product,” with its nakedly commercial overtones, or the idea that news is ever a product rather than a process; but in these culture wars, it seems, technology wins even when it comes to language.)
　
　　新聞上的創新，通常意味著得跟上社交媒體公司的步調，新聞市場的新進入者，如BuzzFeed已有相當的成果，並盡可能和臉書所發展的業務保持同步；像Vox這樣的公司則專注於提升自己的內部技術，這些技術與矽谷相比也不遑多讓。新聞編輯室的新部門「產品團隊」（product team），便是這種文化摩擦下的產物，特定世代的記者以「裸露的商業色彩」或「新聞被視為產品而不是個過程」的觀點來譴責「產品」一詞，但是在這場文化戰爭中，科技似乎總是佔了上風。
　
Product teams, social media editors, and curation desks are becoming increasingly present in all newsrooms; the cultural friction between these entities and traditional editorial roles might remain, but it is no longer where the key tension lies. The rise of platform companies is having a particularly strong impact on the news app and product teams of news organizations. Facebook, Google, Snapchat, and Apple have all built impressive new ways for news organizations to distribute their journalism, and in the case of Facebook, new ways to actually assemble and tell stories. Huge teams of developers work on video and photographic applications that would be difficult for individual news organizations to develop even if they wanted to. Facebook Live, which Mark Zuckerberg described as “a TV camera in your pocket,” can stream simultaneous live videos from anyone with a Facebook account and a fast enough internet connection.
　
　　產品團隊、社交媒體編輯和策展部門，已逐漸出現在新聞編輯室中，這些部門和傳統編輯之間的文化摩擦仍可能存在，但不再是緊張的局面。平台公司的興起，對於新聞組織中新聞的應用和產品團隊產生了強烈的影響；臉書、谷歌、Snapchat和蘋果都為新聞組織創造了令人印象深刻的新聞傳遞模式。以臉書的例子來說，新的模式更能準確的說故事，大型的開發團隊相較於個別新聞機構，更能開發影像和攝影相關的技術；像是被Zuckerberg稱做「口袋裡的攝影機」的臉書直播（Facebook Live），只要透過臉書帳戶和足夠的頻寬，便能傳輸即時影像。
　
When Simo was asked at ONA whether Facebook is in fact a media company, she was more measured than her boss. “We play a big role in the media industry and we take that responsibility very seriously,” she said. “The reason we primarily consider ourselves a technology company is because we don’t create content, and we are not in the business of picking which topic the world should care about. What we really care about is making everyone have an experience in News Feed where they see what they want to see.”
　
　　當Simo在ONA年會上被問到臉書是否為一個媒體公司時，她比她的老闆有更多的思量：「我們在媒體產業發揮了重要的作用，我們非常重視此一責任，」、「我們認為臉書是一家科技公司的原因是因為我們不生產內容，我們不為世界挑選應該關心的話題；我們真正關心的是動態消息（News Feed）的使用經驗，以及讓人們看到他們想看到的」。
　
The looming question for many newsrooms is how much to invest in their own technology teams versus using the tools and techniques being developed for them by Facebook or Google? It is almost impossible to get news executives to speak on the record about this, as many are already involved in deals with social media or search companies, but the views of those who are most alarmed by this could not be clearer: “What will happen, if we are not careful, is that the only technologists we will continue to employ will be those who can work on integrating whatever the news organization is doing into their platform,” one executive told me. “Independent thought and independent development will be at an end.”
　
　　許多新聞編輯室面臨的問題是，該如何投資自己的科技團隊，而不是使用臉書或谷歌為他們開發的工具和技術？我們很難讓新聞主管回答這方面的問題，因為許多人已參與了社交媒體或網路搜尋公司的業務，但最令人擔憂的莫過於：「未來會是什麼情況？如果我們稍不注意，不管未來新聞組織有何作為，我們所僱用的技術人才，肯定也是那些能將內容整合到這些網路平台的人」，一位高階主管告訴我。「獨立思考和獨立發展的榮景將不復見」。
　
Another was even more forthright: “What have technology companies done, really, apart from make journalism worse? A couple of years ago, amazingly inventive interactives and graphics were [at the] top of the most-viewed lists at news sites. You wouldn’t get that kind of creativity today because they don’t work with Facebook Instant Articles.”
　
　　另一個回應更直截了當：「除了使新聞更糟糕，科技公司到底做了什麼？幾年前，新聞網站上最受歡迎的，是令人讚嘆的創新互動模式和圖像，但你今天不會視那樣的表現為創意，因為他們無法和臉書的即時新聞（Instant Article）連結」。
　
Without an informed and independent lens on the work of large technology companies, news organizations could easily surrender to the idea that they no longer belong in the business of shaping their own formats and production tools. But independent and creative advocacy for its own technologies is one of the most powerful ways journalism can retain its relevance.
　
　　若沒有科技公司在這方面的努力，新聞組織也大可放棄開發自有格式和生產工具的想法；但是追求技術上的獨立和創造性，一直都是新聞業保持其影響力的最有效方式之一。
　
It was once the case that more technology-focused resources potentially meant fewer reporters in the newsroom. That choice can now be seen for what it always was: a false bargain. As reporting and technology converge, it is not a matter of journalists learning code, but of journalism becoming code.
　
　　曾經有這樣的說法，愈強調技術導向的作法，意味著記者將失去他的舞台，這樣的說法我們可以視為是毫無根據的。隨著新聞報導和科技的融合，這不再是記者要不要學習寫程式的問題，而是新聞數位化已是不可逆的趨勢。
　
Twitter is, I still believe, the most important innovation for journalists since the telephone. I use it to find stories, keep track of sources, and find out what is being said. I think all journalists do, which is why I encourage students to build a profile there. Being a bad journalist but being good on Twitter will not help your career, but being a good journalist and knowing how to use Twitter effectively for news sourcing and reporting is now a core requirement for reporters. I use it all the time, though post less and less, mainly because I don’t have time, but also partly because being “good on Twitter” is like everything else: You have to keep doing it or lose the knack. Also, I’m married to a journalist, and if you are not on Twitter you end up having nothing to talk about apart from the children.
　
　　我仍然相信，推特是自電話以來，對記者來說最重要的發明。我使用它來找尋報導題材和追蹤相關線索，並了解完整的內容；我認為所有的記者都是這樣，所以我鼓勵我的學生都建立一個推特帳號。擅長使用推特不會幫助你的記者生涯，但作為一個好記者，知道如何有效地使用推特進行新聞蒐集和報導，這對記者來說是必備條件。我一直使用推特，雖然發佈量越來越少，主要是因為我沒有時間，但部分原因是花愈多時間在推特上，你得持續下去，不然久了也會生疏。不過，我嫁給了一個記者，如果不使用推特，等於除了孩子的話題外，我們之間沒啥好談的。
 
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作者：Emily Bell
編譯：朱弘川
原文網址： http://www.cjr.org/analysis/tech_editorial_facebook.php