Saving The Print Media, One API At A Time
The media is dying, the sky is falling, the horsemen of the apocalypse are riding alongside the Bloomberg stock ticker. Doom and gloom.
It’s easy to fall into the gaping hole of desperation that seems to be gripping the business world, and, in particular, the media (where yours truly happens to live).
Despite all the turmoil, a slow movement to innovate news content soldiers on, and by this I mean the emergence of the open API movement (API: application programming interface) which allows third-party developers to work with a publication’s content.
You can think of this in the same terms as Twitter: Developers work off a basic service (news, in this case) and develop specific applications, such as specialized search engines. The possibilities are as limitless as the ideas that an individual programmer with access to the API can come up with.
The New York Times was the most high profile newspaper to open its API to developers, and now The Guardian has followed suit. Now, you might think — so what? The API allows a newspaper/publication’s contents to be spread around the web for free, how is that different from what is happening now? The difference is that the information can carry certain pre-conditions, one of which is that developers join the publication’s own advertising network. This would be the internet’s equivalent of vendors, with the advantage that the vendors actually pay nothing for the content, just as long as they agree to be part of the source’s ad network. That’s money that goes back to a newspaper. And with the advent of “behavioral profiling ads” pioneered by Google, you can start to see the value in this.
There is, at the same time, much talk of bringing back the previously failed firewall (pay per article, or pay for premium content) business model, as recently as a few days ago it was touted as a “vital revenue stream” at Mediabistro’s TVNewser Summit in New York, attended by many publishing heavyweights. Even the New York Times seems to be interested in resurrecting its previously attempted Times Select firewall, which seems somewhat at odds with opening its API to third parties.
It’s difficult to gauge whether there is an overall strategy in place at large newspapers like the Times (that wouldn’t be my guess) or whether there are simply conflicting interests at work between business development departments and the bowels of its tech. and web departments (that is my guess) with entirely different ideas about internet strategies.
TechCrunch brings up a very good point in pointing out that The Guardian, for one, was able to put into action its open-API system quickly as it is run by a charitable trust “which does not have shareholders who would normally have a heart attack at such a move.”
There has been no shortage of experts arguing that the future of newspapers in the U.S. may lie in the hand of similar non-profit trusts, and there is a point to be made here. Regardless, if the business side can be convinced that there is a viable advertising model to be had in an open-API (and with revenue careening towards the bottom, as it is now) it may not be that difficult to make a convincing argument.
Rather than hiding content behind payed firewalls, the future may actually be in spreading content as far, and as quickly as possible. In a way, this would be no new model at all. Just as one looks at advertising on the paper version of the NYT, one might simply look at these ads online at a third-party site online somewhere, as far away from the source as a paper reader in California seeing an ad that was printed in New York.
TechCrunch sums it up: It helps that the paper is owned and run by a charitable trust which does not have shareholders who would normally have a heart attack at such a move. The payback is that apps developers are going to end up building an ad network for The Guardian as a result.
March 11th, 2009 at 8:29 pm
Wow i tried to keep up but honestly it was a little over my head. Ha ha. But you did shed some light on how vast this situation really is. Thanks for the info, Keep up the good work.