Journalism.co.uk Editors' Blog » API

Business Insider: Chart of the Day – 24% of US newspapers don’t use digital delivery platforms

Judith Townend — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 09:39:35 +0000

Courtesy of Silicon Alley Insider’s ‘Business Insider’, a chart showing that 24 per cent of US newspapers do not use any digital delivery platforms to spread their online content.

“The American Press Institute asked 2,400 newspaper executives if their papers ‘provide access to stories or information such as sports scores, headlines, stock quotes, etc.,’ via Twitter, Facebook, Email alerts, Mobile/PDA, YouTube, Kindle, Flickr, e-readers, etc., and told them to ‘check all that apply.’”

24 per cent of all respondents answered ‘None at this time’.

Business Insider post at this link…

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Nieman Journalism Lab: Recommendations from the API for the Chicago meeting

Judith Townend — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 09:57:54 +0000

Nieman Journalism Lab links to a copy of the American Press Institute (API) report prepared for the ‘paid content’ Chicago meeting for newspaper executives last week.

“Top newspaper execs (…) heard from several entrepreneurs who are proposing new ways for papers to generate revenue online,” NJL reported.

Full story at this link…

Poyntor’s Rick Edmonds comments on it here, at this link.

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Beet.TV: Why APIs are essential – CurrentTV’s Robin Sloan

Laura Oliver — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 07:58:18 +0000

Good explanation of APIs and how they can be used by third-party developers and as the foundations for media partnerships.

Trust your users and realise that they’re smarter than you think, adds CurrentTV’s Robin Sloan.

Full story at this link…

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WSJ Digits blog: How Business Week is using Twitter’s API

Laura Oliver — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 11:12:18 +0000

Business Week has synced comments on its social-networking site, launched last year, with Twitter, using the microblogging service’s API.

Users of Business Exchange are being asked to leave comments of 120 characters, which will then be posted to their Twitter account with a link to the site.

Full post at this link…

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CenterNetworks: TimesNewswire API launching this week

Laura Oliver — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 17:53:51 +0000

The New York Times next API release will be TimesNewswire, which will give developers access to live news headlines, CN reports. The announcement was made at the Times’ first ‘hack day’ last Friday.

Full post at this link…

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How to: Track a conversation in Twitter

John Thompson — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 17:15:30 +0000

Twitter is increasingly being used by journalists to make contacts and track news events, but the Twitter user-interface (UI) itself is pretty limited making it difficult to track conversations. Fortunately its open API structure and the ability to subscribe to various types of RSS feeds from Twitter means there are a number of ways to track a ‘buzz’ around an event or specific conversations.

Hashtags are one way to identify conversations based around particular subjects or events. If you don’t already use them, you might have at least seen them being used by others in your network. Basically it’s a keyword that you use in your Twitter post to associate it with a group, topic, or event. For example, every Monday night there is debate on Twitter ‘hosted’ under the hashtag #journchat, aimed at public relations professionals and journalists. If you consider that an unholy mix, then there is a tag just for journalists #journ plus other, less popular, variants such as #mediachat and #journalism.

Another common usage for hashtags is at events. For example, our senior reporter Laura Oliver recently attended the Oxford Media Convention and was one of several journalists Twittering using the hashtag #omc09 (Journalism.co.uk has a dedicated Twitter channel for live event coverage – @journalism_live).

So if you want to monitor posts with those hashtags, one simple way is to create an RSS feed based on a keyword search of Twitter or, better still, Twemes. But there are also a number of other tools you can use to track conversations.

Tools:

TweetDeck – This desktop application (still in beta) enables you to split all the Tweets you receive into topic or group specific columns. The default columns can contain all tweets from your timeline, @replies directed to you and direct messages. You can also make up additional, live-updating columns using the ‘group’ (to create a sub-group of just your favourite Twitterers, for example), ’search’ and ‘replies’ buttons. You can also filter each column to include or exclude items based on keywords or users. Unfortunately it does not support multiple Twitter accounts (otherwise I would definitely prefer it as my main Twitter client to Twhirl).

Tweet Grid – This is a browser-based application that allows you to search for up to nine different topics, events, conversations, hashtags, phrases, people, groups, etc. As new tweets are created, they are automatically updated in the grid. One particularly neat feature is that it can automatically add hashtags if you Tweet directly from their web page.

Monitter – A browser-based application that is very similar to Tweet Grid except it is prettier and you can search for Tweets made within a certain distance of a chosen location. A widget is available for your blog or website but you would need to know a little html to install it.

Roomatic – A browser-based application that creates an output page of Tweets based on a keyword or hashtag. Unfortunately it does not seem to do much else but could be handy if you need to direct readers to a page containing live updates on a particular event or topic.

TwitterThreads – A browser-based application that threads your twitter feed, making it easier to follow conversations or connected Tweets. However, it does not seem to keep the threads together for long, or in quantity.

Tweetchat – A browser-based application that allows you to monitor and chat about one topic. You can tweet directly from the page and it will automatically add the hashtag of whatever ‘room’ you are in. The Twitter stream live updates.

Tweetree – A browser-based application that puts your Twitter stream in a tree so you can see the posts people are replying to in context (but does not properly thread them). It also pulls in lots of external content like twitpic photos, youtube videos etc.

Can you recommend any other tools? Let me know in the comments.

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ITN maps news items with Google mash-up

Stuart Goodwin — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 17:30:29 +0000

British news company ITN has started to develop Google Maps to its advantage: a new mashed-up map of its news stories uses Google Gears Geolocation API to determine the user’s location and provide them with geographically relevant news.

The site provides a map with pinpoint flags highlighting the location that a particular news item is related to. All the user has to do is click on the individual flag and read on for the full story.

The reader can change the destination to view worldwide stories, while also being able to access archive stories stretching back to the previous month.

Website mibly.com has also used Google Maps, on this instance, working in conjunction with BBC iPlayer, tagging where a certain programme was located, allowing UK residents to view the selected show by clicking on a flag.

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NYTimes.com: New York Times releases first API

Laura Oliver — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 16:24:49 +0000

The New York Times campaign finance API gives users and third-party developers access to presidential campaign finance data from the Federal Election Commission collected by the paper.

Daylife targets online publishers with new multimedia service

Laura Oliver — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 14:58:25 +0000

The software engineering company behind Sky News’ recent online revamp, Daylife, has launched a new product aimed at online news publishers.

Sky used Daylife’s products to create topic pages of related multimedia content called ‘in depth’ pages.

The new Daylife Enterprise API will similarly let publishers re-purpose blog posts, text, data and audio-visual content in new ways online.

How does it do this? The service will collect this content and then create feeds which the publisher can put to use a variety of ways – as per their request.

For example – the Enterprise API was trialled by the Washington Post to create picture galleries from the Beijing Olympics – searchable by sport and country – and to accompany its US presidential campaign coverage.

Daylife took all the incoming photos from Post photographers around these subjects and made them available to the paper as an API, ready for use to create new pages on its website.

Utilising existing content in this way can be a success in terms of web traffic – making sites a more attractive prospect for advertisers, says Daylife CEO Upendra Shardanand.

As part of the product, publishers can make these content feeds open to the public and third-party developers – a feature which Shardanand hopes will lead to more collaboration on news content between publishers and users.

“In terms of e-commerce and advertising there’s been so much innovation in the last 10 years online, in comparison there’s not been so much in news,” he told Journalism.co.uk.

“How do you innovate if you don’t do software? I don’t know what the next best concept is but a service like ours can be shared.”

Publishers should not dismiss outsourcing this work, says Shardanand, after all it’s not their job and with the amount of content they have available would be extremely time consuming – the company has over 200 machines running to process the content. It’s not for free, but licences are decided on a customer-by-customer basis.

Instead, he told us, the aim is to get the most value out of the content that publishers are already producing for both online and other editions – such as the photos taken by WaPo staff – by doing the backend work for them.

Crucial to the success of the project will be the say that publishers have over what is done with their content – something which Shardanand is keenly aware of.

“These have to be content portals that are still customised and match your brand and voice,” he says.

“It wouldn’t work if the editors couldn’t do exactly what they want. Advertisers wouldn’t value it either.”

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Press Association opens up data to BBC developers

Laura Oliver — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 11:09:41 +0000

The BBC has been given free access to data from third parties for use by its BBC Backstage developers network.

The Press Association (PA) has opened up the API and data from its event listings information for no charge, Ian Forrester, senior producer for BBC Backstage, told an industry conference.

Speaking to Journalism.co.uk, Forrester said PA had opened up its data to BBC Backstage, because they did not have a place to showcase the information themselves.

“They have this huge events database. They know they could sell certain parts of it but only a certain amount. The admin of trying to sell that stuff is too great, they may as well give it away for free, but they are also interested in seeing the creative use of this data,” Forrester explained to delegates at the Media Futures Conference.

Several data streams from within the corporation will also be made available to the network in the next few months, Forrester added.

Data from the BBC iPlayer will be opened up through BBC Backstage, he said, with plans to create personalised search functions and alerts when content is added to the player.

Following the recent addition of full text RSS feeds for the BBC’s blogs, Forrester told Journalism.co.uk that full text feeds for the BBC’s news content would be ‘a natural progression for newsgathering’.

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