Derek Gottfrid Speaking at OSCON Thursday. Photo Courtesy James Duncan Davidson/O’Reilly Media

Is the future of news in the hands of internet developers? News organizations New York Times and National Public Radio (NPR) think so.

O’Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) this week offers the opportune time for NPR and New York Times programmers to discuss the release of their news source Application Programming Interfaces (APIs).

NPR’s announcement came earlier in the week. NPR’s API introduces the ability to write applications surrounding public radio’s text and audio from most radio programs dating back to 1995. It was only a matter of days before Phoenix programmer John Tynan exemplified what one can do with the API by mashing up NPR headlines with a Simile Timeline visualization.

Likewise, New York Times programmer Derek Gottfrid is excited about his API. Officially on the menu: public-ready releases of some of the APIs they’ve used internally. First out of the gate later this year will be read-only APIs in distinct content segments, like movie reviews, restaurant reviews and wedding announcements.

Both APIs follow Reuter’s lead: The news agency released its API in May. If the APIs take off, soon all major global news organizations will be offering audiences ways to craft their own presentations of what the news is and what it looks like on the Web.

Wired.com took Dan Jacobson from NPR and Derek Gottfrid from the New York Times to a Portland restaurant to talk about their company’s news APIs.

Wired.com: What do you say when people ask you what an API is?

Dan Jacobson from NPR: We’ve been spending a lot of time in front of lots of people explaining what we’re doing. It is a challenging topic for people who don’t understand it. Basically we’ve been saying it’s like an implicit handshake between two applications, or two computer systems, or whatever.

Derek Gottfrid from The New York Times: It really is just another syndication mechanism for us. That data that you, an API user, have. Because it’s [in a] semi-structured form, it allows it to show up in different places — in applications, in different places around our website, in different places around the web in general.

Wired.com: So your people know what RSS syndication is. Can you leverage that to explain things?

Jacobson: Gottfrid: When we talk about syndication, it’s something that, for a newspaper, has been part of the business vernacular for a long time. So it’s distribution. It’s the same notion as distribution, or influence… Part of The New York Times mission is to create, collect and distribute high-quality news, information and entertainment. “Distribute” is analogous to syndication. I think the terms have a natural flow to people in the organization.

Wired.com: What makes your API special? How do you expect people to use it?

Gottfrid: What makes it special is the data it accesses, right? It’s not the format and whether it is XML or JSON or anything like that. For the format part, we want to just follow best practices of the community. It’s really access to all the interesting data, whether that’s all the recipes that have been in the paper, or all the news articles about particular topics, or weddings, or events or whatever data that we’ve accumulated over the years. I think that the data is really the interesting part, and that’s the unique part that we have. That is a differentiator.

Wired.com: So The New York Times API will be able to go back in time through the entire historical archives of the paper?

Gottfrid: We have the data, so creating APIs around it is done internally all the time. Making them so they’re consumable by the outside world requires additional effort, and that’s really where we are. We have all this data. We’re familiar with it. We’re trying to make it as palatable, and as easy as possible for outside folks to get at it is really the next step that we’re working on.

Jacobson: I agree completely. It’s all about the content. If you don’t have compelling content, then no matter how sweet the application is nobody’s going to want to come and get it. I think that NPR, like The New York Times, offers a rich, unique spin on the content we provide. In terms of the functionality of the API, one of the interesting things we’re offering is a very comprehensive way of slicing through the data. If you go to NPR.org, for example, you’re getting NPR’s presentation of our data. It’s our compilations and our topic structures. Through the API, users can come and slice the content however they want it, create their own custom feeds and we’ll leave it up to them to build exactly what they want. Things we couldn’t even envision.

Wired.com: NPR has an affiliate network that The New York Times doesn’t have. Does the API stand to affect the dynamic between National Public Radio and its affiliates?

Jacobson: There are two sweet spots for the API: It fits NPR’s public service mission to help people be better informed, enabling users to get our content in a variety of ways — however, they want it. For the stations, it lets us get local station content in and then feed it back out through the API, which we’re doing some of already. But it also enables the stations to represent to their communities whatever they want. They can mash up local and national content. Or their users can do the same in ways that, prior to the API, they couldn’t do.

Wired.com: Does The New York Times have intermediaries it’s looking to serve with your API?

Gottfrid: We’re geared to whoever is going to find the content interesting. Anyone that’s interested in it, we’re interested in making it accessible and having them use it. This isn’t something that’s driven off of market research or anything like that. This is fulfilling a basic gut-level instinct that this is how the internet works.

Derek Gottfrid from New York Times and Dan Jacobson from NPR

Wired.com: Where does that gut-level instinct come from? Is it a matter of transforming internal work processes and extending them?

Gottfrid: Yeah, it’s a natural outgrowth. As we’ve become more sophisticated, we’ve taken more of a platform and service architecture [approach] to a lot of the things we do so that we can re-use them and mix them and mash them for our own site. I think [The New York Times API] is the natural extension. It flows into a lot of things that we see in terms of opening up to the broader web. Really going from being “on the internet” to being “part of the internet” — intermingling our stuff with the full experience of things around the internet.

Wired.com: Where does NPR fall on the internal versus external utility of its API? Was it developed specifically with external users in mind?

Jacobson: The evolution of our API was pretty organic. We built an API to support NPR.org, and launched that in November of 2007. Our site’s been running on the API for that long. The natural next step was to say, ‘Wait a minute. Why can’t we just put this out there.’ What do we need to do in order to open this up and satisfy … users’ goals with YouTube and Google Maps and the way they’re able to reach new audiences. Then it became a policy question as we sat down with a range of stakeholders and figured out what we are allowed to do. Turns out we’re allowed to distribute through the API everything that we have the rights to (which isn’t everything you hear on NPR stations).

Gottfrid: The technology people sit at the nexus of [our audience] so we facilitate an interchange between [them]. Clearly we need to be able to do stuff with our content management to support the reporting efforts. Our end users, well we wouldn’t be here without the readers. It’s a continual balancing act, especially when online readers aren’t as remote as they are with the printed product. There’s a different relationship that we’re establishing.

Jacobson: I think Derek said something really interesting, implying that technology is also a stakeholder in the kinds of things that happen. This API project, for example, is something that we drove. We became a stakeholder because this is a project that we wanted to release, which is somewhat tied to the business goals. Making the case that we need to do this is convincing the business people that, yes, we need to do this.

[Interview by Brad Stenger]