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#news2011: A guide to APIs and why ‘everybody who has content’ needs one

Rachel McAthy — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 06:24:28 +0000

API is a term that is increasingly referred to in relation to news outlets. APIs are not new – indeed it has been two years since the Guardian launched it’s open API. But what does it mean for the online journalism industry today and why is are APIs so important?

On the third and final day of the Global Editors Network news summit we heard from Torsten de Riese, who is managing director of NewsCred, which, as he explained, “runs a content API and serves the world’s best journalism”.

He offered delegates a helpful description of APIs and explanation of why they are so useful to content providers, which I got him to expand on in an interview after the session.

The most important part of API is the I, the interface. API is the interface for your content for the rest of world.

It’s the interface to building products, the interface to your apps, it’s the interface to your web, it’s the interface to your IPTV presence.

It enables you to build stuff with your content. It basically takes content, standardises it in terms of format, tagging etc. You can decide how much you want to tag, what standards you want to apply.

Every time someone wants to take your content and build something, they know exactly how to get it.

De Riese, who was involved in the launch of the Guardian’s open API, told the conference that, at the Guardian, there was a “vision to get developers to use our content, build stuff and so we just opened it up”, with “hundreds” of developers now using it and building “really exciting stuff”.

He added that the way the Guardian was able to build its Facebook app recently was thanks to its API. Today the Guardian announced its Facebook app has so far been installed by over four million users.

Developers can just go and build stuff. There are lots of people out there who want to do that, who just want to get on with it. If you give them something they can do something, they can use it.

APIs couples with enthusiasm in the developer community means publishers can “tap into this wonderful world of developers and allow them to come up with some really interesting stuff”.

In the audio interview below I talk to De Riese about APIs and why content providers “all need” the technology.

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Guardian’s Open Platform – some thoughts from the blogs

Judith Townend — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 12:52:23 +0000

Not everyone is shouting from the rooftops about the Guardian’s release of content through an API, but on the whole the blog posts have been positive about the Open Platform launch:

Matthew Ingram is excited over at NiemanJournalismLab: ‘The Guardian Ups the Ante on the APIs’

as is Shafqat Islam of NewsCred: ‘The Guardian launches Open Platform: Why This is Really Big’

Jeff Jarvis shares his thoughts here: ‘APIs: The new distribution’

Dave Winer’s not so optimistic about it: ‘Folks this is, in no way, open’

and Tim Burden was raising his concerns on Twitter yesterday.

Any other good posts or thoughts you’ve spotted?Similar Posts:

SpinSpotter: unspinning online news?

Laura Oliver — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 15:21:53 +0000

Aimed at uncovering ‘bias and inaccuracy’ in online news stories, new service SpinSpotter has gone live.

The site, which describes itself as ‘very beta’, lets users install a special toolbar – Spinoculars – to identify, share and edit online articles, which they consider biased.

“I believe that journalism has become spin-heavy because journalists operate in an echo chamber. They eat with other journalists, socialize with them, and ride in cabs together. Closeness of groups can drive closeness of opinion and intellectual laziness,” said Todd Herman, founder and chief creative officer of SpinSpotter, in an open letter.

SpinSpotter has attempted to create an objective criteria for what is and what is not biased by working with US journalism schools and using the Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics.

“Their [the journalism schools'] expert knowledge (…) were then combined with guided user input and sophisticated algorithms to identify each instance of bias and inaccuracy in online media, whether it is a reporter stating opinion as fact, an unattributed adjective, a paragraph lifted from a press release, or an expert source with a clear conflict of interest,” a press release from SpinSpotter said (it’s okay, I’ve flagged it up and linked to the release).

Looks like the Spinoculars are only available for Firefox at the minute. Once downloaded and turned on they’ll identify if elements of a news story have previously been identified by another SpinSpotter user.

You can also use them to select and report articles or parts of stories that are biased according to different ‘rules of spin’, whether its as a result of the reporter’s voice or a lack of balance.

SpinSpotter comes hot on the heels of NewsCred – a site aiming to gauge the credibility of news sources – launched late last month.Similar Posts:

Newscred picked up by Yahoo

Laura Oliver — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 11:20:04 +0000

Newscred, a site aimed at gauging the credibility of online news, is gaining momentum: a Twitter update from co-founder Shafqat Islam earlier this week said the site had been featured on Yahoo’s personalised homepage My Yahoo.

The service was featured as a daily recommendation from Yahoo for new apps to add to the homepage.

Islam said it was not part of a deal between the two companies, just a pleasant surprise.Similar Posts: