Snowfallgate and Startups

This analysis is tragically incorrect. The Times legal department in no way represents the Times newsroom or the developers who made Snow Fall. Reporters and developers love tools that let them tell stories like Snow Fall more quickly and inexpensively. There is only one reason the NY Times hasn't made another story like Snow Fall in the last 5 months: It's too damn expensive and time-consuming to replicate in a one-off way.<p>I work with hundreds of newspapers and a dozen or so have contacted me to ask how they could use Scroll Kit's technology in the past few days. In fact, one of my larger top-100 newspaper clients signed up to use Scroll Kit this week. They won't be the only ones.<p>In case you haven't noticed, newspapers need to find new ways of making money. And they needed it yesterday. Folks trying to monetize newspapers aren't worried about someone copying their article to demonstrate a use case (hell, this event probably drove meaningful traffic to the original), they're worried that they're not going to be able to stay in business. If you were like any digital director around the country, you didn't give a shit about copyright infringement. You only salivated over all the cool things you could be making and monetizing. Since most newspapers have no way of creating a Snow Fall type of article themselves, they'll use Scroll Kit, they'll use it at scale, and they'll sell premium ad units to monetize these articles in a more effective way than normal content. From my viewpoint, that's a real positive for those of us trying to keep journalism alive. All the surrounding conversation about copyright infringement is just so completely missing the point that it might as well be arguing about the right way to polish the brass on the Titanic.

I'm not quite sure how this earned a "gate" suffix. Linking to some NYT content is hardly wrongdoing of Nixonian proportions :-)<p>Also, I'm not sure that this negatively affected Scrollkit at all. The main effect of this story will have been to a) remind people about the Snowfall story and b) remind people that Scrollkit provides tools for creating similar content. Both are good outcomes for Scrollkit!<p>As for "relationships", I'm not sure what relationships Scrollkit can have damaged given that they had no existing relationship with the NYT. Perhaps some people affiliated with the NYT will see Scrollkit as an annoying upstart and perhaps the NYT staff will feel annoyed that Scrollkit is commoditizing a design concept that was pioneered by them, but that's a small part of the market for Scrollkit (and, by definition, a market that doesn't need Scrollkit because they already have in-house technology to do what Scrollkit does!).<p>I think it's a fairly healthy part of startup culture that a startup can figure out how a larger company is doing something inefficiently, come up with a faster, cheaper, better (?) alternative, and tell the world about it. Startups shouldn't be bullied by bigger, established companies in these situations, and we certainly shouldn't accept that the larger company had a legitimate reason for doing so. The "relationship" that the NYT wants to have with Scrollkit looks like a fairly abusive one to me.

The thing that confuses me more than anything is that the original pitch is so <i>strange</i>- "we made a replica in an hour!".<p>OK. If you showed me an advertising poster you really liked, I could fire up Illustrator and give you a decent replica in a couple of hours. Does that mean you should hire me as your new ad agency? Of course not. The actual act of piecing together a creative is tiny compared to <i>planning</i> it. Anyone who works in the startup industry ought to get that- the coding is often the least of your problems.<p>So, Scrollkit never claimed that they made a Snow Fall, they claimed that they were able to throw together a copy of it in a short time. So what? Why would that make me want to use it?<p>(also, fun to see that the founder of ScrollKit is no stranger to lifting UI concepts other sites have pioneered: <a href="http://codybrown.name/timeline/" rel="nofollow">http://codybrown.name/timeline/</a>)

The story thats not being told is how those "hundreds of hours" spent building "snow fall" included direction, videography, 3d and 2d modelling and animation, photography, content-writing, design, coordination, and frontend development.<p>Scrollkit took just one aspect of that (frontend development) and stated "The NYT spent hundreds of hours hand-coding ‘Snow Fall.’ We made a replica in an hour."<p>Its outright dishonest, and devalues the great effort that others spent on it. I can understand why they are pissed.

I'd argue that Scrollkit damaged their relationship with the NYT in order to ameliorate their relationship with Silicon Valley.<p>It's hard to tell Scrollkit's business model from their splash page (like the article says, the only copy is "we are looking for publishers with big stories to tell."), but if I were to guess, the 'big fish' like NYT/WSJ/etc. are never going to use scrollkit, at least in the short term: these are the publishers with dedicated engineering teams.

hello hn, this is cody from scroll kit. I want to respond to a few things.<p>1.) I had no plans to write a post about nytimes legal after their initial email. I simply complied with their demand and wrote them that I had taken down the video. Their next email, where they told me to remove all references to the Times from our site was pretty absurd and thought they should be called out for it. If you’re willing to take the risk, it’s a good idea for everyone to call out a big company sending overreaching legal requests. I can only imagine how many other startups don’t challenge their demands and are bullied into complying.<p>2.) The biggest misunderstanding here seems to be that we're somehow undervaluing the creative struggle, and the reporting/creation of assets, it took to arrive at "Snow Fall." This doesn't make much sense to me, it's a replica which by definition means the pieces are already there, we're just coming to it with entirely different code.<p>A big point to make is that it didn't take the Times hundreds of hours to make "Snow Fall", it took them <i>thousands of hours.</i> It's safe to say they spent, at least, a hundred + hours on JUST the assemblage of their content onto the page. It's that process that we have dedicated ourselves to improving. Which, for a lot of news orgs who don't have the resources of the Times, makes it possible for them to be able to experiment with these kinds of stories.<p>Another way of phrasing our tagline could have been something like:<p>We spent thousands of hours hand-coding scroll kit so you can make a replica of “Snow Fall,” in one hour.

NY Times lawyer Samson's response <i>clearly</i> indicates a complete lack of understand of what scrollkit is/does. He thinks it's a toolkit for replicating content, when it's a toolkit that <i>can be used</i> to replicate <i>technique</i>.<p>Scrollkit used bad phrasing. What they should have said -- "NY Times spent hundreds of hours building the groundbreaking Snow Fall article. With Scrollkit they could have completed it in only a few hours. Here's proof! p.s. NY Times Editors -- contact us and we'll be happy to get your next award-winning article built faster and cheaper!"

I'll start out and say that the NYT's legal department was off the mark here...but they've been off-the-mark (i.e. heavy handed) in a lot of incidents...as far as I've seen, the journalists and developers who were part of Snow Fall didn't seem to give a shit, so maybe someone at NYT was like, "Well, someone <i>do</i> something".<p>So while NYT legal may be a bunch of blowhards, it's hard to say that they're quixotic takedown effort has any actual effect on journalistic innovation.<p>There is something highly off-putting about how scrollkit has carried itself in this. It's already been well pointed out that the "hundreds of hours" in making Snow Fall did not involve hand-coding, and that the barrier for storytellers to create "Snow Fall" like productions is <i>not</i> putting together the HTML/CSS, but actually making the content and doing the design work. And I say that as someone who has made a living building HTML and CSS.<p>Because if the substantial work of building a Pulitzer Prize level feature takes just an hour...then logic would seem to dictate that in about 5-10 hours, any given scrollkit user could create something quite epic (if not Pulitzer worthy), and yet, browsing through scrollkit's few exsmples in their Twitter feed, I don't see anything that comes close to delivering on the impressive design or content that Snow Fall had. And I'm not belittling them...that's not <i>their</i> fault. "Snow Fall" productions are <i>hard</i>, and the HTML/CSS editor used to create them is almost entirely tangential to their quality.<p>Do we really need to discuss the merits of scrollkit's purported claim, that "templates" are holding content creators back? Templates exist because in serious publishing businesses, there are not the resources to re-invent the HTML wheel, and templates as defined by CMSes do very important things, like represent content in a manageable, portable format. Anyone here who has happily moved their blog to Jekyll/Octopress, I believe, would agree with me. In any case, if we take scrollkit's philosophy to its logical conclusion, then the days of Flash and bespoke UI/UX were the glory days of content. And I'm being sincere here, some Flash apps/portfolio pages were <i>amazing</i> and have not yet been replicated at the HTML5 or even iOS level. And yet, Flash as a canvas didn't quite work out...<p>The reason why I'm going off on a rant here is that, unmentioned in the OP, is that scrollkit got $200,000 from the Knight Foundation in an initiative to promote journalistic innovation in the long battle to making online journalism viable and vibrant. (DocumentCloud, which most HNers might recognize as the progenitor of Backbone.js, Underscore.js, and several other useful Jeremy-Ashkenas-inventions, was also a Knight-funded initiative.) So there's something a little galling about how scrollkit, which was given 6 figures to aid journalism, is instead raising publicity for itself by dumbing down the already muddled discussion on content management.<p>And also, its exploitation of the emotions and confusion in the continuing debate over intellectual copyright is also a little annoying.

On the one hand, I agree with the notion that "working with the established market" is a better business strategy.<p>On the other hand, kissing up to reactionary incumbent market forces and even compromising your product to appease them leaves me feeling really, really dirty.<p>It's a pragmatic choice. If you can afford to and still come out on top, I would prefer kicking their asses over kissing them.

nice post