Chris Chi
Software Engineer, the New York Times
How coders keep a newsroom’s digital engines running
Chris Chi is a software engineer at the New York Times.
A film major in college, Chi traded the instability of the film industry for a job in IT at a startup. The lines of code on the screens he was servicing eventually led him to try out software engineering. Chi taught himself how to code and found that once he was familiar with the language, coding was a lot like writing an essay. In software engineering, he found that he was able to marry his creative passions with his very logical side.
Within a year of learning to code, Chi got a job testing code and continued to build websites on the side. He then worked as a software engineer for German media company Bauer, building and maintaining the content management system (CMS) its U.S. team used to post stories. He eventually joined the New York Times’ advertising team.
By Tiffany Chang
I always get mad when my parents think I work in IT.
I am a software engineer on a team called Data Insights Tooling at the New York Times. We build apps that visualize first-party reader data gathered from our readers so that data can be easily understood by our ad and sales planners. They then use that to better sell ad slots and targeted campaigns to partners who want to advertise on the New York Times’ digital site.
I’m now more on the business side of things, but when I was at Bauer, I was more on the publishing side as a software engineer on the CMS team building and maintaining our own proprietary CMS.
Supporting Journalists Behind the Scenes
The main thing that editors interface with every day is the CMS. Whether it’s a proprietary system or something like WordPress, all publishing companies have one. Most big companies, including the Times, have their own because they have specific needs, whether that’s privacy or a format for a unique type of article.
The Times has many different teams supporting its CMS because it’s obviously very important. You write your articles in that tool and it needs to be saved a bunch of times to make sure that all the drafts are safe. There’s also a CMS for photojournalists, because photo files are a lot bigger than a .doc or .txt file.
There are teams behind all the articles and pictures that readers see. It takes a lot of coordination and management to have all those pieces run smoothly.
When I was at Bauer and saw the problems I was solving, it made me feel very proud of working alongside editors. It’s cool to be part of that “show” — it feels like I’m a gaffer or something like that, working in the background.
Whatever you’re publishing, you want eyes and you want readers. It feels like a production of sorts. I’m proud to be a part of that. That’s what’s gotten me to be in publishing for the last several years now. It’s been pretty cool.
Taking a Reader’s Privacy into Account
When I was growing up, the internet was just the Wild Wild West. It’s crazy to think that back then, kids could sign on to websites and talk with fake characters, and you had no idea who was on the other side.
Privacy is becoming even more present in the media conversation and all of technology in general.
There are teams behind all the articles and pictures that readers see. It takes a lot of coordination and management to have all those pieces run smoothly.
There’s a big push to use first-party data in publishing. The further we go into digital publishing, privacy becomes a bigger issue. So the big thing for the New York Times is moving away from getting information from a third party and relying more on first-party — that is, gleaning information from our readers on a voluntary basis (say, a survey or a question that pops up for people to answer). It’s not asking everybody everything, but given the answers that we received, everyone’s behavior on the site can be tracked.
It’s anonymous but it’s still information on the behavior of any given user. If Anonymous User A acts exactly the same as Anonymous User B who is a Baby Boomer, upper-middle class and female, you can reasonably deduce that Anonymous User A is also a female, upper-middle-class Baby Boomer. Stuff like that.
Data scientists then take the information that we do know and map out how a specific reader acts compared to other readers. The data means we can get a better understanding of which group this reader most likely belongs to: Who’s a Gen Z? Who is a Millennial? Who is this one person without needing to ask literally everybody?
Digital media companies are starting to treat the users with more respect. We shouldn’t be tracking people without their knowing, even if that’s how Facebook and all these big companies made a lot of their money. Everything has been very driven by getting eyeballs onto the page and getting people to click. It didn’t matter how.
But you live and die by online platforms. My former company, Bauer, was heavily affected by Facebook’s algorithm. If the video or article algorithm changes, you can have a good day; if it changes in another way, your company can have a bad day.
Publishing companies need to be able to stand on their own platforms, or they can try to be resilient through the rise and fall of other platforms.
TikTok is in right now. Your business can go all in on TikTok, but what happens if the TikTok algorithm changes or the company gets bought by somebody else? It’s all still ever changing.