December 2011’s Carnival of Journalism, hosted by the Guardian’s developer blog, asked journalists what present they wanted from developers, and developers what they wanted in return. The answer offered here was a single quality: invisibility.
The framing was that journalism has always been shaped by its tools, from the telegram to television, and that the shaping runs both ways — journalists bend technologies to the work of gathering, processing and distributing news. What happens in between is a negotiation, as established routines meet an emerging technology and reporters try out different ways of telling stories. For journalism educators that creates a specific problem, because students now have to acquire digital storytelling competencies on top of everything else.
The teaching approach described was to make the technology as invisible as possible so that students could concentrate on the journalism — not to leave them ignorant of how it works, but to keep their attention on which features actually improve a story. The fixed-line telephone is the model: nobody considers the infrastructure required to connect two people at a distance, they simply use it to interview and to gossip. Soundslides was offered as the digital equivalent, software easy enough that the mechanics of building an audio slideshow stop being the difficulty; the difficulty returns to where it belongs, in making stills and sound carry a narrative worth following.
The ideal tool, on this account, combines a powerful set of features with an interface that hides them — complexity behind simplicity. The wish addressed to developers was for more tools of that kind.