We need a PIT Crew for news

Link: Mamdani invests in tech capacity to “solve real problems”, by Pamela Herd in Can We Still Govern?There’s a lot that newsrooms can learn from Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral administration in New York City. His latest announcement is the Public Interest Technology (PIT) Crew, a set of dynamic, cross-disciplinary digital teams that will solve problems across the city using a rapid, human-centered approach.As Pamela Herd notes here, this is a shift from contracting out to building internal capacity:“Traditionally, the conventional wisdom since the 1990s and before was that governments could buy tech products like an off-the-shelf product. This led to a massive turn to contracting out, which was great for consultants but bad for government capacity. The outsourced approach often cost too much, delivering too little and too late.[…] What people who know tech and government have been screaming for years is that building good tech needs in-house capacity, even when you are using contractors.…