In talk series, VICE Media CTO shares thoughts from the back end

The NYC Media Lab has been doing a series of interviews with CTO’s of New York Media companies. It kicked the series off with a conversation with the CTO of Williamsburg’s VICE Media, Jesse Knight. Knight has been working with the company since 2001 but joined it full time and became CTO in 2012.

VICE is preparing for a major expansion.

Some takeaways:

• 3rd party junk. A big trend we’ve followed at Technical.ly is individual B2C startups launching to create tools that solve problems shared by lots of websites. So the in-house devs don’t have to build every single part, much of the back end is third party. That’s all well and good, but a lot of those offerings also don’t live up to expectations or do more harm than good, Knight says, “So a very keen bullshit detector needs to be used when evaluating any new vendor or technology.”
• The VICE CMS. The company opted to build its own CMS because they had some particular needs that weren’t covered by others: specifically, easy translation and the ability to quickly and simply copy content from one vertical or country feed to another.
• Hot topic. Making use of data. VICE is bringing in loads of data and is working hard now to maximize the use of that information. This continues to be a moving target for media companies.