What I Do

Old-timey photo of old-timey
Globe entrance
(photo by me!)

It's getting harder and harder to explain to people exactly what I do. Professionally speaking, anyway. I work for a newspaper, but these days newspapers aren't quite the simple operation they've always been, and besides, my employer had already found a way to make publishing just a newspaper pretty complicated long before it opened the can of worms of digital publishing.

There was a time I could simply say I was an editor, or that I designed pages. But after a few years with the company I managed to start using my derelict computer science skills to start contributing to the newsroom publishing system that we use - that's the software that reporters use to write their stories, designers use to build printed pages, and editors use to publish the website.

After another few years, my work on the system became less of a sideshow and more my main purpose in being there. In 2010, after 10 years with the company, I officially stopped having any hand in editing content or contributing to my company's actual products and transitioned into full time support for the computer system.

So what exactly does that mean?

I help find and fix bugs where I can, I work with the vendor to fix bugs where I can't, and I try to represent the newsroom staff's needs and interests when it comes to developing new tools or features in the software. With my computer smarts I can actually add some features to the system myself. Sometimes I am simply lobbying the vendor to add the features for us - this often takes the form of working with a formal customer association.

My background is print, but nowadays no one in the journalism business really thinks of news gathering as a print-specific endeavour. We build or gather content (text, photos, graphics from our own sources as well as wire services and freelancers) and then publish it to a wide variety of media. Unlike many newspapers in the US - and even some in Canada - our print operation is still paying the bills quite nicely. But we are moving very aggressively towards digital publishing as the future of our business, and that means a constant cycle of upgrading our systems for digital publishing. Because they are all integrated now, I have a role to play in that even though my knowledge of online publishing isn't as strong as I'd like it to be.

Right now (Winter 2012) I'm working on an upgrade to the system with a team of front-end and back-end developers, along with a team of newsroom staff who are learning the new version inside and out so that we can a) make sure it does everything we need it to and b) can teach it to everyone else.

I hope this gives you at least an insight into why I find it so hard to explain what I do. If you have any questions after all this, please fire away in the comments.