Tag Archives: New York Times

The OJB guide to open news APIs – part 1: Guardian, NYT and Daylife

In the first of a series, Peter Clark, founder of Broadersheet, takes a look at three of the leading APIs for people looking to build news-based web projects and mashups.

About six months ago, a friend of mine released a new search engine called Duckduckgo. Duckduckgo was based on the much hyped (free) Yahoo BOSS search engine platform, it was well received and now serves hundreds of thousands of searches a day.

Yahoo recently announced BOSS was going to be a paid-for service – surprising a lot of developers. When you’ve built a popular (albeit non-profitable) service on a free platform, and that platform suddenly becomes rather expensive – that eats into your ramen budget.

So when various news agencies announced content delivery developer platforms, I was particularly interested in where they were headed.

There are various services – some free, some paid-for – that developers can use to extract content and valuable information from news agencies. My friend was developing a web application that took content from The Guardian, and automatically printed a bespoke newspaper each day about your favourite topics. He expressed displeasure about The Guardian restricting developers from doing this:

“You will not: Use Open Guardian Platform Content in any printed format”

We’re entering a new age of restrictions and jumping through hoops and loopholes to make awesome content platforms for users.

There are three top platforms for news content which I explore below. I’ll discuss what you can and can’t do technically. Continue reading →

Games and journalism: Now that journalism is in trouble, why not play with it?

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Karthika Muthukumaraswamy looks at how games have been used in online journalism.

BlackBerrys, iPods and Kindles are not enough anymore. Let’s add a joystick to the expanding repertoire of tools available to news consumers.

Gaming is often overlooked as a tool for disseminating news. Online games are attempting to explain the economy through the politics of oil, educate users on disaster readiness in the context of Hurricane Katrina and, perhaps more in line with traditional video games, some are exploring the various military operations implemented in the Iraq war. In a strange likeness to fantasy sports, one game allowed people to draft their own cabinet picks for Obama’s then-new administration.

Nick Diakopoulos, a researcher at the Georgia Tech Journalism and Games Project, gives one compelling reason for the media to turn to online games: they offer a format that would wean away from the current emphasis on unusual and inopportune events, focusing instead on more process-oriented journalism. How many times do you hear about a specific incident or event that killed troops or civilians in Iraq, without any knowledge whatsoever of the military operation that caused it? Continue reading →

If you’re still thinking about charging for online news in 2009, you’re dead already (a primer)

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This afternoon I will once again be working with a group of editors as we look at business models for online news. To their credit, the micropayments/paywall issue rarely comes up – and then only as a ‘devil’s advocate’ question. But it seems others have been asleep for the past 10 years. To those and the unfortunate souls having to field these questions, I offer you the following primer culled from recent coverage of this pointless debate: Continue reading →

Guardian joins New York Times in releasing open API

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Will 2009 be the year news organisations finally went open? Barely a month after the New York Times allowed users to build on 28 years of content with its articles API (with immediate results), The Guardian is opening up over a million articles to developers for free as part of its own ‘Open Platform‘. Continue reading →

An iTunes model for news? More difficult than you think.

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The following is a comment I posted on Standupkid’s Localtvnews blog, a response to the David Carr NYT column ‘Let’s invent an iTunes for News’. The comment ended up being so lengthy I thought I’d better reproduce it here:

The whole iTunes idea is flawed on so many levels: mainly as people are willing to pay for music because they play it over and over again. News is disposable. Also, an individual piece of music tends to be unique – but when an earthquake happens, it’s not like the only way you can find out what happens is by paying a dollar to download the article about it. Put another way, how much effort does it take to compose, rehearse and record a track? Now how much time does it take a journalist to write a standard article? Very little journalism has value approaching that of music and yes, perhaps we’d pay for it, but how would we find it? And how could we produce it often enough to be viable? (Note that most musicians do not make a living from their music – would an iTunes for news mean the same for journalists?). Continue reading →

US election coverage – who’s making the most of the web?

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Elections bring out the best in online journalism. News organisations have plenty of time to plan, there’s a global audience up for grabs, and the material lends itself to interactive treatment (voter opinions; candidates’ stances on various issues; statistics and databases; constant updates; personalisation).

Not only that, but the electorate is using the internet for election news more than any other medium apart from television (and here are some reasons why).

PaidContent has a good roundup of various UK editors’ views, and decides blogs, Twitter and data are the themes (more specifically, liveblogging and mapping). Continue reading →

The notification homepage

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Written by Wilbert Baan

The last year has seen social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn updating the design of the homepage to turn it more into a notification page: the homepage as a place where you can see what your friends are doing. Your virtual center of the network.

These updates let you know what your friends are up to, but they also let you know what your friends like or share. The social networks often work as recommendation networks as well. Continue reading →

New York Times + LinkedIn = another step towards personalised news

BASIC principles of online journalism: S is for Scannability

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In part three of this five-part series, I look at the need for scannability in writing for the web. This will form part of a forthcoming book on online journalism – comments very much invited.

Users of news websites are generally task-oriented: they will most likely have arrived at your webpage through a search for something specific. If they don’t find that something specific fast, they will go elsewhere.

How do they find that something? Seventy-nine percent of Web users scan pages. They look for headlines, subheadings, links, and anything else that helps them navigate the text on screen. Continue reading →

Another source of inspiration for journalism (Bas Timmers)

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Guest Blogger Bas Timmers is Newsroom Editor at Dutch broadsheet de Volkskrant.

‘A newspaper is like an oil tanker,’ editors in chief call out in despair again and again. Changing the direction is often slow and difficult. But that of course just depends on whether you have the right rudder or not. Because the captain is still steering the ship. Yes, journalists can be quite nasty and stubborn, but mutiny is still a step too far for most of them. Continue reading →

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