We all know that words carry power. A person’s word choice can make or break a conversation, a motto, or even a simple salutation. Seeing GitHub taking action with word choice, I decided to replace the default branch of this website’s repo from master to main.
News
The latest from Alley’s team of experts. Filter By Topic: Commentary
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Lede, Alley’s platform for journalism startups, is our answer to scaling the technology needed by news organizations.
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A spectre is haunting the open source CMS community—the spectre of Medium.
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Jotham Sederstrom’s public reaction to being fired cold by the New York Daily News for appearing to publish plagiarized content is remarkable in its candor and its acceptance of blame but belies the pressing issue at hand for those of us who build news websites. Jotham would still be toiling away for his teetering employer if not for a harebrained Content Management System…
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A few months ago, this Hacker News item sparked a lively and—fittingly, for a discussion about this topic—asynchronous discussion about the role of group chat systems in open source projects and distributed companies. At Alley, we use Slack. We’re very happy with it, and it’s a really important venue for expressing our company culture. However, I should…
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As software developers, we routinely must maintain code that we did not build in the first place. Maybe the original developers left the company, or maybe they were consultants whose contracts ended. Our tendency is to blame these developers for whatever we dislike about their code to deflect criticism, apologize for defects, and gain permission…
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In a piece for NiemanLab about Digital First Media, Ken Doctor argues that spending on technology and development is vital to being “digital first.” But I wonder if Doctor has the correct definition of that term. A journalism operation can be “digital first” and receive very little assistance from technology teams. At its core, “digital first” is…
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I understand the value of a certification to Acquia in their ecosystem, and I appreciate that they named it after their company rather than Drupal itself. It’s a play from Oracle’s book that could conceivably make the Acquia-verse larger and more integrated. It’s still disappointing, though, and not something that resonates with my opinion on where our…
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At Alley Interactive, we work with a lot of media product startups. We build big websites for content publishers such as NYPost.com, NewRepublic.com, and KFF.org, to mention a few. We’re the team that takes all the inputs — designs, integrations, CMS backend, hosting platform — and turns it into a live site. This is a fun (and sometimes scary) position to be…
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We were very sad to learn of Peter Kaplan’s death last Friday. Peter meant a lot to us at Alley, and to me in particular. As a programmer, I certainly can’t claim to know Peter as an editor or a mentor, like so many influential journalists can, but he had a huge impact on our…
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Felix Salmon sounded off today, at some length, about one of my favorite topics—choice of CMS for news organizations. One of his central points is that Vox Media has a distinct advantage because of its über-CMS. I admit, what I’ve read about Chorus makes it sound pretty awesome. But there’s a broader question here about…
