hyalineskies

For those not familiar with the ways of the Web, a standardista’s argument of accessibility and content/design separation seems esoteric. Why does anyone care about this standards business, anyway? If it works, it works, right?

My advocacy of web standards has caused most of my work thus far at my paper to be regarded as nothing more than a good joke for managing editors’ meetings. Modular has been reduced to nothing but a silly catchphrase within the company, with all of my methodology and advocacy thereof falling upon deaf ears, some not familiar with technological jargon, the others entirely apathetic.

In a day where those holding swords of XHTML have conquered the format wars of the late nineties, some news organisations still don’t get it. While some major syndicates still use table-based layouts, we notice that the Associated Press, one of the largest (and oldest) news organisations in America, attempts to mark their shift into the world of the Web with their own video syndicate service.

At first glance, a free streaming video service is a great idea; for smaller papers who are AP members but can’t afford the staff necessary to develop and create content for a video player system in-house, such a network offers can keep the local media competitive in a world of national online media providers. In the AP’s case, however, the devil is in the details: using Microsoft’s restrictive Windows Media format, the AP OVN (short for Online Video Network) works solely with Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 and Windows Media Player 10 on Microsoft’s operating system. That means that any non-Windows user, or even Windows users using better browsers such as Mozilla Firefox, are restricted from viewing the OVN’s content. (For the geeks: I attempted to bypass the warning screen by faking IE’s user-agent, only to read that WMP10 and Flash 7 were installed. They must be using some PC/IE-based detection methods; I have “support” for the WMV mime-type through Flip4Mac, as well as Flash Player 8 installed.)

Aside from enraging the standardista, what does this mean for the ordinary end user wishing to view the AP’s video content? A lot. If you’re a Mac user, any video on the AP’s OVN is entirely inaccessible. Any tech geek, who is more prone to watching online video anyway, is probably using the Firefox browser; they, too, are out of luck when it comes to the AP’s content. The AP has effectively resurrected the “browser wars” of a bygone era, and, in the process, alienated nearly 15% of American Internet users. This effect is observed not only on the AP’s own site, but also on any newspaper’s site that uses the AP’s system, which includes major papers such as the Houston Chronicle and the Kansas City Star.

Meanwhile, the Associated Press, which clearly is an all PC/IE camp, is touting their new video service as an ad-supported network “designed to make AP members more competitive in the rapidly growing online video business.” Since this browser-war thing happened decades ago in Internet-time, I’ll use an analogy that those not in on new media will get: If the AP OVN makes a pedestrian newspaper “more competitive,” it’s akin to giving it a horse and buggy in a world of automobiles. It offers nothing new and only underscores the technological ignorance of parts of today’s mainstream media.

The competition is just too great to botch a service this significant: ironically, Yahoo!, the web company that old media is petrified of as its Internet dominance threatens to turn media outlets into nothing more than content-provider shops, has built a cross-platform service to show AP video through Yahoo’s own, special license with the AP.

Plenty of new media professionals are sharing this same opinion on Mediashift and Poynter’s online-news discussion group; in fact, the AP even attempted to defend the new network, stating that the compatibility issue is “one Microsoft is addressing.” As for the format war issue, Sue Cross, the VP/Online at the Associated Press, writes that “[The] AP has been providing video to web sites for years via FTP and continues to do so.” To continue my earlier horse-and-buggy analogy, those not using the OVN’s technology are given not even the horse and buggy, but rather a rickshaw.

This lack of cross-platform (or cross-browser) support shouldn’t just be riling up those who advocate standards and compatibility only to have the argument fall upon the deaf ears of print-familiar copy editors. Format wars such as the AP’s shouldn’t even be allowed to happen in the world of journalism, where the media’s sole purpose is to report on and provide information to those around us. By limiting ourselves in these petty ways, restricted by advertising contracts and “partnerships” with corporations such as Microsoft, we tiptoe on the borders of our purpose as journalists and the newspaper’s secondary role of being a business. There is a point at which all of this proprietary technology, although maybe more convenient for us, seriously undermines our ability to support the writers who rely on us as new media journalists to syndicate their content.

In this case, for once, it’s the idealistic, new-media-journalist-in-training side of me that’s furious about the AP’s obsolescence, not the standardista. Although it’s true that there is no right way to approach the issue of cross-platform compatibility, restricting content through what is nothing more than corporate strongarming by Microsoft is outright unethical. Unless the AP comes up with an equivalent system for those not on Microsoft’s software - their lame FTP argument not withstanding - they are indirectly showing a drastic bias in their Web development work.

Just because we’re not writing, filming, or otherwise producing the raw content does not mean that we are not held to the same ethical standards. To borrow a term from Mario Garcia, being a “visual journalist” does not move us away from the same code that binds the industry; our work is no different than that of the work of other journalists, and platform bias is just as limiting as the bias that plagues our reporters. There is no reason why we do not extrapolate the ethics codes of those who write, edit, and transmit information in English to our own markup languages.

It’s a travesty that this point has been overlooked by America’s largest news cooperative in an industry that prides itself not only upon reputability through experience and age, but upon those staying as true as possible to the purpose of journalism. On the AP’s own website, they claim that their “mission is to be the essential global news network, providing distinctive news services of the highest quality, reliability, and objectivity with reports that are accurate, balanced, and informed.” As of now, however, I have to question the AP’s own mission statement: either their About page is filled with nothing but shallow marketing lingo or they have entirely missed their mark in the rush to make their video network less non-competitive. Hopefully, the Associated Press will come to their senses and realise what they’ve just done; for now, however, if I want to see video, I’m not going to be going to newspaper sites. It’s off to Yahoo for me.