New York Times acts like "platform", launches two new APIs

Posted by Alisa Zykova on February 24, 2009 at 3:17 PM

The New York Times (NYT) may no longer be simply a newspaper, but also a "platform company," suggested blogger Taylor Barstow after visiting the Times Open seminar last week, an event concentrating on Application Programming Interface (API).

This week, the title will be launching the Times NewsWire API, which will act like a "firehose" and "stream of consciousness," providing Web developers with access to the NYT's live headlines. The API will include a "trimmed down data set" but may include all online content in the future, Barstow acceded.

The NYT also recently launched an article search tool that permits users to access every article written since 1981, which amounts to about 2.8 million articles. The API contains 28 searchable fiends and updates content each hour.

Times Open attendee Daniel Tunkelang said that the NYT's APIs may make it possible for the publication to get the advantage of having "users' active engagement without the costs of diluting their brand."

"Reporting is no longer a scarce commodity. It's hard for these huge news organizations to do it faster, cheaper or even as well as a whole web of new media producers around the world," wrote ReadWriteWeb after the NYT released its first API in October 2008. "They may be among the top sources for original content still today, but considering the direction technology is moving in - that's not a safe bet for the future."

Prominent media outlets may have a good share of information processing resources as well as material from archives and the NYT may be "far better prepared" to arrange the raw data and provide extra content, "than any individual blogger or small news publisher," according to ReadWriteWeb.

Internet enthusiast Tom Morris mused that while a search API may not be "tremendously interesting" on its own, it may be worthy of note that it is "someone like the NYT" that is employing it, and not simply Web 2.0 sites and outlets gathering user-generated content.

Source: ReadWriteWeb, TaylorBarstow.com, CenterNetworks.com