A throwaway line I used in a post the other day keeps repeating on me like pepperoni pizza: If you want to be big in media in the future, make yourself into an API.
I’ve been wondering what it would mean for a news organization to turn itself into an API — that is, a programming interface that lets the public use and remix and also contribute information. Or put the question another way: What would Google do (WWGD) if it ran a news organization? And I don’t mean GoogleNew but any of the reporting organizations it could afford to buy (though I’m not sure why it would): The New York Times, the LA Times, CBS News, CNN. Or, for that matter, what would YouTube do? Or Firefox? What would it mean to open up the news? I’ll start with a few answers of my own. Please add yours:
* Let people — no, encourage — people to distribute your stuff for you. You can no longer spend a huge marketing budget to get people to come to you. So go to where the people are, with the people’s help. That’s what got YouTube seen: letting people put players in their own space, which in turn drove people to discover and dive into YouTube.
* Think distributed in your business, too. That is how Google makes much of its fortune: by taking its ads to where the people are and sharing just a bit of that wealth.
* Let people — no, encourage — people to remix your stuff. They’re doing it anyway. They’re taking a paragraph from here and a quote from there — or video from here and audio from there — to tell the story from their perspective. Stop thinking of that as theft and start thinking of it as a compliment. If you’re not being remixed, you’re not part of the conversation. And the conversation is the platform of the today. So feel free to set some rules — it’s only polite to attribute and link — but then open the doors and let people create more great stuff on not only your finished product but also your raw material (your quotes, your data, your cutting-room floor). Look at the great things people have built on top of Google, YouTube, and Firefox. You want to be part of that construction project. The BBC has started down this path. So should others.
* So be a platform for news. Enable people to use you to make connections to people and information. Provide the means for them to record those school-board meetings and share the fruits. Give people tools and training to accomplish what they want to accomplish. Create networked reporting tools that let the people join together in acts of journalism (see: NewAssignment.net).
* Experiment. Start labs for news and let the people in to create and criticize alongside you. Don’t be afraid of betas and don’t be afraid of failure. You can’t be perfect. You never could.
Websites that publish or have APIs (Google, YouTube) are providing a utility-like service through their API. Google, for example, has APIs for search, maps, blogging, etc. These are web equivalents of the old news wire services. News products, on the other hand, go through a further series of processes (aggregation, editing, layout, distribution), which are media and product-dependent. And besides creating the product itself, all news products are branded, so the brand must be managed and promoted.
The genius of creations like YouTube is that the API pretty much encompasses and defines the product. With great insight, you can create an API encompassing products like YouTube. I don’t believe the same is true for products like the Guardian.
NPR maybe, but not the Guardian. : – )
An API for news… an interesting idea. “Be a platform for news” is the idea I’m taking away from this post. Sure, news sites already have RSS/Atom on their side to “dish out” their articles and stories, but a platform could provide much more. Imagine a system that allows journalists, reporters, and citizens to contribute their stories, reports, comments, graphs, pictures, video, audio (or whatever) in a way that makes it easy for the submitter to slice up the information to make remixing easier. For instance, highlight a quote in some text and enter some meta data (who said what, when, where and why?). You could do the same for a snippet of audio within an inteview. Tag submissions (or portions of submissions) with geographic data (what’s the address of that store that had a break-in?). What’s the mood of a story? What are the sources used? Who funded the story? Adding this type of meta data and then providing feeds (or an API if you will) for each bit of meta data would make for an interesting news platform.
This is partly why I sent you a link to our announcement last week about the NewsCloud Platform API.
Not just the journalists but the news platforms should be open, able to be integrated and accessible. I spent most of my time on our API building an easy to use PHP class for developers to be able to take advantage of our service with very basic coding skills. We’ve also built fifteen examples.
I hope you’ll check out the NewsCloud Web Services Documentation and Examples
When I read the first graf of this post, I thought you were saying that I, as an individual, should become an API.
And I thought to myself, “Well, yeah, that actually sort of happened today when I sat in a meeting and heard a different set of reporters and editors express a familiar set of concerns about building a stronger online presence.”
Now I know what it’s like to do the “blogboy dance” with multiple partners…
[...] Update (8 a.m. ET 10/19/06): Jeff Jarvis wonders what it would mean for news organizations to offer such programming interfaces for sharing their content. [...]
[...] Source: BuzzMachine » Blog Archive » WWGD: The news API [...]
[...] Jeff Jarvis, director of the Interactive Journalism programme at CUNY, who blogs at Buzzmachine, has been waging a vigorous campaign to make the MSM (main stream or traditional) media in the USA grasp the importance of Web 2.0 consciousness. He also writes a column and has consulted for the British Guardian newspaper, who are leading the way with interactive media in the Anglo-phone newspaper world. In other words, the man has credability. Recently he’s been riffing on the idea that "If you want to be big in media in the future, make yourself into an API." In other words, what would it mean for a news organisation to re-imagine itself as a programable interface that would allow its users to remix and contribute their own content? Essentially this would mean that news organisations see themselves as plaforms that enable not just distribution but also as a space for users to contribute their own news, make social connections and create their own versions of the content. Read more> [...]
[...] Before revolution comes language. Before language comes notation and for communicating computers - notation is API (Application Programming Interface).  Every droid, every modern Internet company has a language (PostScript) or an API (Google Map). Jeff Jarvis explains regarding the Newspaper API: If you want to be big in media in the future, make yourself into an API [...]
[...] Remixing, mashing, tinkering with media as data is all the hype. From the Washington Post to many other media organizations they now view their audience as active contributors. The BBC has not only vowed to go web 2.0 (we will see what this means) also introduced a platform for the OS projects it contributes to. They write: For the BBC, open source software development is an extension of our Public Service remit. Releasing open source software helps our audience get additional value from the work they’ve funded, and also get tools for free that they couldn’t get any other way. It also allows people outside the BBC to extend projects in such a way that may in future be used in the BBC. [...]
A great idea – one that may seem obvious some time soon, but radical for now. If we take this to it’s ultimiate conclusion, should the crouds be able to collaborate to the point of dictating the stories covered and direct the journalist to the stories that interest us. Afterall, the little guy doesn’t have the same access as the BBC.
Supporters start chanting “all praise to Allah” during Ellisons victory speech in Minneapolis, during the fox 9 news report @ 9. Ellison will be the first Muslim congressman ever.
[...] Interestingly, I believe we may very well be heading toward a similar challenge for commercial software organizations about their API’s. The conversation around commercial API’s importance continues to gain momentum. In fact, both Jeff Jarvis & Seth Goldstein have written again about this in the last few weeks. However it isn’t a web 2.0 trend until TechCrunch writes about it — and the release of Mashery earlier this week included the following a post with the following quote from Marshall Kirpatrick: The future is going to be built out of APIs – though still controversial in some quarters today, in time they will be as common as corporate web sites are now. [...]