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The New York Times API: Coming, But Is Revenue?

As ReadWriteWeb reports, the New York Times is working on an API that aims to make the entire newspaper 'programmable'.

From the post:

In addition to the API, New York Times CTO Marc Frons told mediabistro.com that internal developers at the paper will use the platform to organize structured data on the site. Following that, the paper plans to offer developer keys to the API allowing programmers to more easily mash up the paper's structured content -- reviews, event listings, recipes, etc. "The plan is definitely to open [the code] up," Frons said. "How far we don't know."

The effects that this might have could be far-reaching. The NYT is still a morning (and throughout-the-day) mainstay for millions of readers (and bloggers), and giving others the ability to use its content as they see fit may result in even more readership.

But access to content will no doubt be limited. What the NYT really wants is for people to visit its website. Not extract content from it. It's the great Newspaparodox. News has become a commodity. Blogs are beating newspapers to the punch, often because it doesn't have to deal with a bureaucratic fact-checking system (for better or worse). Analysis, features, and 'exclusives' are still the things that set the NYT apart.

The questions that still need to be asked are:

* Will opening up an API result in more readership?
* Can that increased readership be monetized?
* Can this be an additional/incremental revenue stream, or one that just aims to offset losses from the newspaper?

The Times' facebook application has only attracted 1,200 users, but then again, the successful facebook apps tend to skew heavily towards the silly.

'Opening up' is a trend, finally. But trends can become fads very quickly without a responsible business model. If you're a content publisher or media company, the least you should be doing is API-enabling your content. The next thing you should be doing is figuring out how to turn that openness into incremental revenue.

If you're an agency, you should be proactively bringing ideas to your clients that can take this API-mentality to its advertising and brand positioning. And if directly increasing revenue is not your goal, then you should be understanding and explaining how getting more open can yield positive results in other ways. But as in any case, to quote Glengarry Glen Ross, 'never open your mouth unless you know what the shot is.'

Recognizing Memeoganda.

The onset of digital media has enabled communication, information, and news to flow quicker than ever before. The sheer velocity of information has had devastating effects on the newspaper industry (at least the printed elements) and consumers have changed their behavior to adapt.

No longer do we have to wait until the 11pm local newscast to find out what happened in our city. We don't even have to respect the anchorperson's request to stay tuned until after the commercial break to hear about a news story. We can just go to any number of websites to get that news before that brief break is over.

When an online news source breaks some piece of information (with our without fact-checking), blogs swoop in to comment, and news aggregator (i.e. Digg) users vote stories up, and they become 'the news'. And the more news becomes endorsed by the people reading it, the more 'true' it feels. Fact-checked or not.

I recently saw a panel at SXSW on the online behavior of teens and tweens, and when a few of the teenaged panelists mentioned that they got their news from Digg, it made me shudder. As great of a tool as Digg is for finding interesting pieces of online content, it's not a news source. Just an 'interesting content' recommendation engine.

But even journalists and professional bloggers use recommendation engines. They're out there; techmeme is an example. And sometimes those recommendation engines are other journalists and bloggers. In this new era of online journalism, these recommendations have become known as 'memes'. Wikipedia defines a 'meme' as consisting of any unit of cultural information, such as a practice or idea, that gets transmitted verbally or by repeated action from one mind to another. Examples include thoughts, ideas, theories, practices, habits, songs, dances and moods and terms such as race, culture, and ethnicity. Memes propagate themselves and can move through a "culture" in a manner similar to the behavior of a virus.

While memes often reflect important topics, they also have the potential to create stagnant monologues that doesn't necessarily get us anywhere -- eventually just turning what should be solution-deriving conversations, into noise. That's when memes make the leap from becoming units of cultural information and legitimate conversation to being momentum-generated waves of propaganda. Or, as I will business cliche-ify, memeoganda.

What used to be called 'trend pieces' are now being ripped from the headlines of blogs and even other publications. The biggest culprits tend to be traditional (especially print) media, and overzealous bloggers (in fact, I randomly stumbled upon this post by Mark Evans on the topic of blog topics via Techmeme) looking to capitalize on popular conversations/memes.

When journalists in traditional publications stop having original things to say, or just have the same ruminations on existing problems without offering up solutions, we get classic memeoganda. Lately, I've seen examples of memoganda regarding the ad industry ranging from the 'death of ad networks' to 'facebook's demise' to 'google click volume' to 'the death of the music industry' to even the state of the economy/recession.

These trend pieces get written so quickly and so close to each other, that while they may raise awareness of important topics, they water down the depth of the coverage, and result in a stream of 'also-ran' stories.

I started writing this blog post last night, and right on cue, this morning Techcrunch tells us about a new startup called Publish2 that will make memoganda even easier by providing journalists and newsrooms with their own Digg-like resource for finding out what's hot.

You know, maybe it's just me, but I yearn for the days when journalists broke hot stories rather than write about stories that are already hot. Memeoganda is sucking the life out of investigative journalism and seems to be more about finding new and exciting ways to conjure up ad inventory than to publish content with depth and meaning. And while stories that yield more ad inventory (read: linkbaiting) can be good bottom-line revenue band-aid, they are not the solution to mainstream journalism's woes.

The long-term answer is to strive to be the best at what you do. Break the news that matters. Investigate the broken news deeper. Don't fall prey to the easiness of spreading memeoganda.