January 9, 2009

The Gray Lady Developer Network

I’m not a journalist by any means. I’m more of a technologist. So, I’m struck at a new marriage that seems so obvious that I’m surprised I’m hearing about it now.

The Gray Lady now has a developer API . That’s right: NY Times is offering tools to developers that allow them to access information programmatically. And I’m not talking about getting RSS feeds of stories or anything that mundane. That’s table stakes. NYTimes is building out the hooks for developer-journalists to access data that is otherwise difficult to obtain easily. Right now they have:

That the Times has a developer network seems strange at first glance. They’re a news source and not Yahoo!, right? But this is a natural extension of their reporting. Providing information in an unbiased fashion so that people can weigh the evidence and draw their own conclusions is part of their soul.

Some folks might argue that this isn’t journalism. I wholeheartedly disagree. For me, exposing these RESTful APIs reflects a dedication to providing citizens access to content that they couldn’t get otherwise. It reflects a different type of analysis, certainly, but it is motivated by the same objectives that fuel traditional journalism.

The Congress API, by the way, scrapes thomas.loc.gov, house.gov and senate.gov and makes the data accessible to anyone who wants to roll an app that can consume them. All the dirty work of data collection and integration is abstracted from the programmer-journalist, leaving them with a well-reasoned, deliberate information source.

Oh yeah, this also is in addition to the excellent work they have done by partnering with IBM’s ManyEyes visualization technology. Go to the Visualization lab and pretend you’re Edward Tufte for a day.

I can’t wait to see what happens with this.

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