By Joe Grimm

Here we go again.

People are still chasing their tails over a word, just as they have during years of debate about whether “blogs” could ever be journalism. Blogs are, but that debate continues.

Now, people are getting worked up because Mark Zuckerberg used the word “hacker” in his Feb. 1 filing to take Facebook public. Zuckerberg used fewer than 500 words to describe “The Hacker Way,” the ethic that drove Facebook to success. Some people focused more on the word’s negative connotations than on the message.

Robert D’Ovidio, an associate professor of sociology at Drexel University in Philadelphia, told the Associated Press, “Symbolically, it doesn’t bode well to Facebook and to potential investors. I think it shows maybe an immaturity on his part. He should definitely know better.”

My. The 27-year-old billionaire is immature because he told potential investors that Facebook is filled with hackers?

“The Hacker Way,”as Zuckerberg describes it in the filing, has these characteristics. I will omit the offending word:

• “continuous improvement and iteration … something can always be better, and … nothing is ever complete. They just have to go fix it — often in the face of people who say it’s impossible or are content with the status quo.”
• “build the best services over the long term by quickly releasing and learning from smaller iterations rather than trying to get everything right all at once.”
• “Instead of debating for days whether a new idea is possible or what the best way to build something is … just prototype something and see what works.”
• “the best idea and implementation should always win — not the person who is best at lobbying for an idea or the person who manages the most people.”

It sounds to me as if we need a whole lot more of that, not less. Smart newsrooms are trying mightily to change their culture so they can invent on the fly, implement ideas more quickly and open up their power structures. We call that being “agile,” or “nimble” or “pivoting.”

The hacking tradition is not new to newsrooms, nor has Zuckerberg invented a new word. Some of the most resourceful people I’ve ever met were old-time photographers or page makeup people who could improvise a solution with no time and few resources. A roll of tape and a stick sometimes got the photo that no one else could get. Mysterious holes on the page were sometimes plugged with a story fished out of the previous edition’s trash.

The Hacks/Hackers group is not trying to break journalism but is trying to fix it by marrying news and technology.

Please, let’s not get hung up on a word. There’s too much at stake.

Read Zuckerberg’s “The Hacker Way” in Facebook’s filing. Just search on “hacker way.”

Joe Grimm, a consultant and adjunct faculty member of the Freedom Forum Diversity Institute, recruited for the Detroit Free Press, Knight Ridder and Gannett from 1990 until 2008. He now teaches at the Michigan State University School of Journalism. He has run the JobsPage journalism careers site at www.jobspage.com since 1996. Questions about careers? E-mail Joe for an answer.