It is becoming a fact of life at newspapers: good reporters and editors are still journalism gold but more and more often it is programmers who are the key to effectively delivering the news online.

Technology obviously has always been part of the online news experience. Someone has to create the content management system, code the HTML, publish the stories. But in the early days, online newspapers looked pretty much like the print versions - a collection of text stories "shoveled" from one side of the digital divide to the other. Once the basic software and hardware were set up, it only required some minimal HTML skills to get stories online every day.

The new(er) generation of online news involves a lot more: multimedia, interactive Flash presentations, personalization, databases etc. None of these have traditionally been possible without some very high-end technical skills. That has been a problem, especially at small papers where it is just not possible to hire a programmer who is probably worth, in some cases, the same salary as the publisher.

Luckily a solution has begun to arrive: tools created by programmers (often programmer/ journalists) that let the "word" and "photo" people pull off technical feats previously requiring degrees in computer science.

My favorite example of course is Soundslides. The program can not help you take better photos, but it can certainly let you create a heck of a nice audio slideshow without knowing a thing about Flash. The list goes on: Atlas and Dapper are among others I am playing with at the moment.

Along the same line is Caspio Bridge. Caspio makes a web-based create-your-own database system that seems to work like MySQL for dummies. After working with it for just 30 minutes today, I was able to upload an Excel spreadsheet and create several web pages to allow web-based browsing, searching, editing and exporting of data. That does not sound like a huge deal - but that same effort tooks us two weeks when we created our original childcare database last year.

I am looking forward to working with the Caspio product some more this week, but I am more looking forward to the next generation of these tools that can help us (on a budget) make news websites more than just a photocopy of the print newspaper.