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With the word Digital on every tongue and even newspapers circulating over the Internet; United States’ most widely circulated (and respected) newspaper, the New York Times is taking strides to increase its online readership.
Currently the top news source at Memeorandum and the third on Techmeme , the stats show that bloggers are serious about its reporting. New York Times is now working out a way to make the newspaper programmable, with an API.
New York Times, CTO Marc Frons has said at mediabistro.com that developers are wiling to use a platform to organize the structured data on the website. The paper then plans to offer its API, enabling the programmers to pulp the paper’s structured content; from reviews to recipes. And according to Frons, the plans are to open the code up.
The plans are to have the API out when summer arrives in US with more additions available for the public within six months.
New York Times has been the forerunner in digitizing the newspapers over the last year. Their RSS reader built on Microsoft’s WPF platform was launched in 2006 and things have taken a rocketing boost since the past fall.
It has tried certain things like putting up Facebook application that brought them 1,500 active users daily. And an even newer attempt was that of putting reader comments on the main page of the site. Which means that New York Times has been in and trying the digitizing aspect very seriously (aren’t they moving along well with the new age?).
The New York Times went head on with Techmeme by launching its own news aggregator powered by Blogrunner technology it had acquired. According to NYT Tech Editor, Saul Hansell, “it is an answer to Techmeme. A technology that we have built ourselves, based on Blogrunner, a company we bought last year.�
That’s not it, the company made an investment in Wordpress (that powers their own blog) this January.
Aron Pilhofer, the papers interactive news editor says “the goal of an API is to make NYT programmable and everything we produce should be organized.”
Ben Kudria in his blog considers this to be the Death of Old Media. And I sort of agree with that as well. But keeping an eye for the fast paced digital age, I personally appreciate the move, given NYT authenticity and high quality commentary by very well informed experts. Let’s wait and see how this move pushes others into following.
Thanks for mention, Bilal.
The old media that’s dying here are the physical newspapers, the TV networks stubbornly pushing the same news, without taking advantage of their users.
Social Media is all about equalizing the consumers and the producers, as opposed to just corporations producing, and consumers have the content shoved down their optical nerve.
An API is a good first step in decentralizing the distribution of content.