E-Media Tidbits

PP Digital (CC license, via Flickr) What if news was much easier to play with? Structure can aid creativity.

On May 23, MediaBistro reported that the New York Times' digital side is developing its own open application programming interface (API). While that sounds really geeky, it's pretty important in terms of getting more mileage out of, and opening new journalistic and business options for, the site's extensive content.

An API is a programming tool that allows one site or program to interact easily with other sites or programs. Think of it as the key to creating mashups -- and who wouldn't love to mashup the New York Times?

So what? Over at ReadWriteWeb, Josh Catone summed it up: "An API is a logical next step for newspapers. It will give developers access to their vast amounts of well-researched data, and allows the paper's brand to be spread easily across the Web. More access to Times content and the ability to mash it up in new and interesting ways can only be a win for both readers and the paper."

Aron Pilhofer, the Times' editor of interactive news, told MediaBistro that the goal of the API is "make the NYT programmable. Everything we produce should be organized data."

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I find that goal -- and the attitude behind it -- very refreshing in the news business. As famed journalist and programmer Adrian Holovaty has often emphasized, lack of structure is a core weakness of how most news content is currently created. In other words, currently it's pretty hard to reuse, remix information contained in news stories, or to create on-the-fly overviews and analyses of news coverage, when all of that information is trapped in blocks of narrative text. Reuters' Open Calais, which has an API that allows users to quickly add certain kinds of structure (format and metadata) to otherwise unstructured blocks of text (like you'd find in a typical news story), is one step toward solving this problem.

It seems, however, that news content is not the immediate focus of the nascent NYTimes.com API. MediaBistro reports, "Once the API is complete, the Times' internal developers will use it to build platforms to organize all the structured data such as events listings, restaurants reviews, recipes, etc."

...OK, I can't blame them for tackling the easy stuff first. Still, NYTimes.com has been doing some very interesting work with publishing interactive database-driven tools, such as Faces of the Dead. It would be great if the forthcoming API also would include access to the datasets behind those features.

For more insight into the NYTimes approach to developing interactive features, listen to this May 13 IT Conversations interview with Shan Carter and Gabriel Dance, who create interactive graphics and multimedia for the New York Times. One point I found intriguing was their discussion of how interactive access to source documents and data is starting to change audience expectations of what news can and should provide.

Ultimately, I think it would be great if more news organizations and journalists could learn a different approach to presenting news -- one that provides structure to information that supports both conventional storytelling and remixing, analysis, or alternate representations. Perhaps if the Times demonstrates some business success through this API, that might motivate other news orgs, j-schools, and independent journalists to start finding new ways to craft the news.

I certainly wouldn't want us to lose great storytelling -- but the fact is, journalists really need to start doing much more than that in order to be as useful as our emerging audience will expect us to be.