Google News to Chicago Tribune - chicagotribune.com

In my five years at Google News, I’d barely ever heard anyone use the phone or raise their voice. But the newsroom at the Chicago Tribune, a 165-year-old urban stalwart, is a much more boisterous cubicle suite than anything at the Googleplex.

During my first month at the Chicago Tribune, the city hit 500 homicides for the first time in several years. When the 500th came, police first ruled it a homicide but then reclassified it as a “death investigation,” a middle ground that didn't quite meet the murder threshhold in a city trying to tamp down murders. The noise that followed of reporters questioning sources was remarkable.

It doesn’t have free food (unless you steal from the fridges, or someone buys you a round at the Billy Goat), but the people watching is much more interesting.

And the sense of connectedness to the outside world is much stronger, particularly as the dozen reporters within earshot of me are all trying to make sense of breaking stories -- running theories and possible sources by each other, badgering contacts and occasionally, yes, oh my heavens, yes, committing acts of profanity.

The cultural differences run deep, but there are some intriguing parallels between my current and past employer: They’re both obsessed with information and their respective roles in civic and democratic life, and fantastic places to write code and learn about the world.

While things were still fresh, I wanted to think about the things that strike me about my new, old-media gig and why I think people interested in code and civic society should really think about joining a newspaper -- yes, a newspaper (or any media outlet) -- in 2013.

To begin with, the newsroom is one of the most connected places I’ve ever seen. Information flows through it constantly, via phones and police scanners and loud clackety-noise-making machines of indeterminate purpose (not the nearby typewriter), as well as the ubiquitous Tweetdeck and Chartbeat screens. We have our morning meetings on a television stage elevated in the middle of the room.

But it’s the informal networks, the overheard chats among reporters and editors and the one-way conversations with sources, that provide a unique and fascinating education on how stories are put together and what’s going on in the city.

There’s an obsession with data here as extreme as any I witnessed at Google, but the relationship reporters have with stats is complex. Visible everywhere in the newsroom, and even during the meetings that decide what makes the front page every day, there’s a constantly-updating Chartbeat readout of that second’s top-performing stories.

It’s part of the cosmic microwave background of the paper, but intriguingly, performance metrics are only allowed to dictate so much. If the editorial decisions were guided solely by where users click and readers read -- they are not -- then we’d run 50 pages of sports and obituaries every day, with the occasional crime story thrown in, especially if it’s weird. (Hello, prison break! Is that you, mysterious cyanide poisoning of a lottery winner?)

A huge amount of effort is expended on totally ephemeral products: Stories that retain their interest for a day, at best, and then never get read again. The yearly article whenever the first snowfall hits is the same every year but somehow different each time -- different sources, maybe a reason for a different angle or excuse for a pun early on. Someone has to spend a couple hours putting that story together, only to be read the next day -- if it runs at all, if it snows at all -- and then forgotten.

It’s humbling to imagine the work of the mammoth printing presses, churning out millions of pages of paper every day, with the sole intent of creating something people read once and abandon.

In contrast to Google, where everything was tested to within an inch of its life and often built entirely in-house, at the Tribune, we run almost entirely on off-the-shelf open-source stuff (with some exceptions) and maintain an active Github repo of the stuff we build. That means I’m playing with more industry-standard technology than I ever did before.

It also means that it’s much easier to break things here, since changes to something live don’t require signoff from multiple reviewers and a complex testing and deployment process that take months to begin to understand. The difference between these two approaches is enormous, and both have significant benefits.

It’s comforting to know how hard it is to break something at Google, but it’s frustrating to wait forever before anyone ever uses your code. At the Tribune, I had some Javascript running in public by the end of my first week. And I barely know Javascript, but the demands of a continuous news cycle require a lot of flexibility, which also means a lot of variety in what you work on.

Today alone, people on my team are working on, among others, a crime project, a microsite devoted to the Book of Mormon musical and a package looking back at the Tribune’s bankruptcy. Aside from being a constant stream of new stories and technologies to learn, these all represent something fascinatingly different from the missions of most Silicon Valley tech companies: individual storytelling.

At Google, an ostensibly-neutral platform provider, getting a project approved that had any specific focus was nearly impossible. The concern went beyond not wanting to alienate users by taking a stand on controversy; we were constantly trying to work on projects that had the largest possible userbase.

If a billion people wouldn’t be able to use what we were building, it didn’t make sense to keep building it. At the Tribune, not having to please a sixth of the world’s population makes it possible to spend an afternoon working on projects like analyzing underutilized schools in Chicago, which can be much more interesting and fulfilling than internationalizing a little-used contact form into 40 languages.

But what’s most exciting to a politics geek with some coding experience is how immense the opportunity is. Millions of people will read the stuff being written across the cubicle aisle from me, and the technical infrastructure that supports it is as primed for disruption as any I’ve ever seen. And no matter how dire the state of the journalism industry (by the way, it’s not as bad as you probably think it is), more people are reading the news than ever before.

Journalism is in the midst of being reinvented, and the products built in newsrooms like this one, all across the country, will wind up driving public debate and understanding about important topics for decades to come. I look forward to being a part of the transformation.

-- Abe Epton, news apps developer

Join Trib Nation on Facebook for more of the how and why of Tribune journalism.