The implication, of course, was that technology is only as good as the reporter using it. The NYT article about King’s use of the Magic Wall detailed how his days as an AP reporter helped him to understand the information presented by the Magic Wall. “You can use this new technology to look at politics the old-fashioned way, which is: who’s finding their people and turning them out?” King told the NYT. MIT’s Raskar describes the press’s hi-tech opportunities as “new containers.” “Technology is providing a new container,” he says. “What the content should be inside that container is really up to the journalist.” In other words, it was always—and should remain—about John King telling the story; the map was the glorified help.

Do what you’re good at

The NYT’s Word Train feature, which asked people to submit a single word that described how they felt before and on election day, seemed like a silly use of space, especially considering that people (including the clever folks at The Economist) started entering random words—like “sassy”—to make the results more funny.

Similarly, the NYT’s more recent pick-an-Obama-cabinet feature asked readers to vote for their preferred candidates for Obama’s cabinet. (Bill Richardson is currently the top pick for Secretary of State.) While they may be entertaining, these features are essentially mindless, and don’t add much value. If what the NYT offers its readers most exclusively, in print and online, are the fruits of access and the staff and experience to regularly feature deep analysis—exactly the things that smaller or less established news organizations can’t always provide—its Web space should reflect those strengths and implement interactivity in ways that most enhance them.

That said, experimentation shouldn’t be anathema. Looking at any assessment of how well things worked, or didn’t, it sometimes seems like the message is that “trying out” some new-fangled idea is bound to end in a display of inefficiency, no match for traditional deep reporting. But that’s not quite fair. Using untested technology is bound to lead to some flaws or flubs. MIT’s Raskar asks for news consumers’ patience: “Things that are being ridiculed right now mostly because of its novelty will become commonplace in just a few years.” And Scola says that because Twitter is “still in its infancy,” it’s simply too early to tell how it will be used most effectively. (She mentions a botched attempt to incorporate Second Life—the free virtual 3D world where users can interact—into politics as an example of failed experimentation. “There were signs at the time that Second Life wasn’t going to have legs in politics long term,” she says with a laugh. “But with any of these things, they’re free or inexpensive, so you make the calculation that it’s worth the time and energy to use them.”)

Ideally, technology should serve one of two purposes: it should help the reporter do his or her job, or it should help the news consumer digest the news. At its best, it can stimulate all kinds of news consumers, from those who want simple visual explanations for complicated events, to those who want to go deep into the numbers that drive the news. There are all manner of technological “containers” that the press can utilize to do these things; the key thing is not to fetishize these new vehicles for their novelty, but instead to use them to enhance the content that’s inside.