New York Times Content Will Be Programmable

In another piece of great news for online developers, the New York Times is promising to open up their treasure trove of content via an API or “Application Programming Interface” which will make it easy to use that content in other applications and websites. APIs are a key part of the driving force that is fueling online innovation. Only a few years ago, complex data sharing among sites and applications was extremely difficult and often frowned on as a violation of good online citizenship at best or copyright infringemeent at worst. Yet the new sensibilities of Web 2.0 have largely turned things on their head, and many large data depositories like the New York Times are working hard to make it *easy* to use their content in other websites and applications.

The practical value of these data sharing tools cannot be overestimated for small scale to enterprise developers as they break down two key barriers that have kept many sites from greatness: The first barrier was technology – even only a few years ago it was often very difficult to create “mashups” that combined quality content from two online sources. The second barrier was copyright – in many cases pulling or “scraping” content from other sites was considered bad form or worse. Now, content sites are happy to have their content used with attribution, and most provide APIs, RSS feeds, widgets, or other tools for the dissemination of their information.

Media Bistro Reports:
The goal, according to Aron Pilhofer, editor of interactive news, is to “make the NYT programmable. Everything we produce should be organized data.”

Once the API is complete, the Times’ internal developers will use it to build platforms to organize all the structured data such as events listings, restaurants reviews, recipes, etc.

They will offer a key to programmers, developers and others who are interested in mashing-up various data sets on the site. “The plan is definitely to open [the code] up,” Frons said. “How far we don’t know.”