Friday, November 30, 2012

The New Media Priesthood: Learning How to Code

Great news: The New Yorker is hiring!

What are the requirements, you ask, to work at the greatest literary magazine in the English-speaking world? Do you need to have gone to Princeton and edited the august literary magazine The Nassau (b. 1848) before you were 22? Should you have edited Toni Morrison for a decade and done the definitive translation from the Turkish of Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk’s short stories?

No. Not even close.

You need to know computer code.

Or—rather—it would be ideal if you could code. And we know what that means. Your job at the literary magazine would not be fixing commas or assigning foreign stories. It would be running tech projects.

Nicholas Thompson, the editor of The New Yorker website, posted the tantalizing job listing on Friday. And just so you know, he didn’t whisper it at the Yale Club or the Round Table of the Algonquin Club. He didn’t try to see if someone’s clever ex-boyfriend from the Harvard Crimson and The New Republic wanted it first. Instead, Thompson posted the New Yorker staff opening to Twitter. And this is what he said: “Hiring a digital project manager. Help us at@NewYorker run cool, ambitious tech projects. Ideally, code too. Ping me.”

If you’re making media in this world—prose, journalism, photography, graphics—you ought to know how to code. And you don’t need to type up a letter extolling the legacy of Janet Malcolm and E.B. White on buttery letterhead. Just ping @nxthompson.

Literary work—editorial work—is now computer work. We’ve known it, on some level, for years. But now it’s right there in the job descriptions. And Thompson’s might not have been such a striking tweet if it didn’t come two weeks after Wired magazine announced a new editor in chief. An eloquent TED talker from MIT with three best sellers about digital literacy and neuroplasticity?  (...)

The stories we tell and how we tell them. The content is the form. And how we tell stories—distribute them, display them, monetize them even—is inextricable from the stories themselves.

by Virginia Heffernan, Yahoo News |  Read more: