When the December issue of Presstime arrived and I saw my name on the Newspaper Association of America’s “20 Under 40” list, I treated it as an opportunity to reflect on what this industry needs from its technology leaders right now, and to recognize the teams whose work is the substance behind the recognition.

This piece is the result of that reflection.

The motto behind the work

The Presstime profile asked for a personal motto. The one I gave was this: a victory where others are won over is preferable to one where others are defeated.

I have watched both kinds of victories play out in newsrooms and on technology teams, and the difference is real. When you push something through by overpowering the people who disagreed with you, you have to keep spending energy holding the win in place. The people who lost the argument find quiet ways to slow the work down. They are not being malicious. They are being human.

When you take the longer road and bring people along, the work goes faster on the back end because everyone is rowing together. In an industry where the technology team and the newsroom have spent decades occasionally eyeing each other across a fence, this matters. The fence is coming down whether anyone wants it to or not. The publications that figure out how to dismantle it together will be the ones still standing in ten years.

What 2006 looks like from inside the work

The picture is clear. Print circulation is sliding. The classified business that paid for so much of what newspapers do is migrating to specialized online sites, and it is not coming back. Knight Ridder, the company where I worked from 1995 to 2003 and where I learned most of what I know about this craft, was sold to McClatchy earlier this year. That sale was a marker. It told everyone in the business that no one is too established to be reshaped by what is happening online.

At Cox, where I have been working since the summer of 2004, my team is building the technology spine that lets a newspaper company operate in a Web environment without abandoning what made it a newspaper company in the first place. Content management systems that serve both print and online without forcing the newsroom to do everything twice. Multilingual publishing tools. Commenting and community features that respect the people who use them. Search that actually finds things.

A lot of this work is invisible to readers, and that is by design. The infrastructure that lets a newsroom move quickly, reliably, and at scale is the kind of work that earns its keep when nobody has to think about it.

The work behind the recognition

The Cofax content management system we built at Knight Ridder Digital in the early 2000s was a team accomplishment, recognized with the Knight Ridder Excellence Award in 2001. The engineers who turned a stubborn idea into running code that ships newspapers every day deserve to be named when this work gets recognized. The same is true for the multilingual platform Xmultra that won an NAA Best Practice award, and the work my team has done at Cox since I joined in 2004 to extend that pattern across more newsrooms.

A list like the “20 Under 40” inevitably names individuals. The work is collective. Both things are true at the same time, and the right move when a recognition like this lands is to use the moment to point at the larger group of people whose work made it possible. Engineers in newspaper technology departments do not get written about often. The reporters who use our tools and the editors who shape the front page get the bylines. The product of our work is the canvas they get to be remembered for. When a list like this one names me, I take it as a chance to point at the people whose names belong on the list with mine.

Looking ahead from here

What I want to do with whatever attention this recognition brings is keep arguing for two things.

First, that the technology side of newspaper work is not a service department. It is a craft of its own, with its own discipline, and the publications that treat it as a strategic function rather than a back-office cost will outlast the ones that do not.

Second, that the people who do this work, in newsrooms and in technology teams alike, do better work when they are won over to a direction than when they are forced into it. This is true at every scale, from a two-person debate about a code review up to the future of an entire industry that is figuring out what it becomes next.

Thanks to the Newspaper Association of America for the recognition, and thanks to every colleague who shaped the work this list is really about.