Deconstructing the newspaper website
Sidin Vadukut -
Tuesday, March 10, 2009 5:45 PM
UK's Guardian newspaper website has just announced a new initiative called Open Platform. From the announcement:
The Guardian today launched Open Platform, a service that will allow partners to reuse guardian.co.uk content and data for free and weave it "into the fabric of the internet".
Open Platform launched with two separate content-sharing services, which will allow users to build their own applications in return for carrying Guardian advertising.
A content application programming interface (API) will smooth the way for web developers to build applications and services using Guardian content, while a Data Store will contain datasets curated by Guardian editors and open for others to use.
What Guardian has done is to open up millions of pieces of content--including stories, photos, slideshows and data sets--and then allowed anyone to pull this data out however they want to and process it in interesting ways through web applications, mashups etc.
On the face of it the idea is patently absurd. Especially in a scenario where newspapers are struggling to stay in business. In fact monetizing their online operations seems one of the few ways in which media companies can make ends meet. So why will a media outlet give away it's core product, in this case news, graphics and data, to the internet?
First of all, Guardian does plan to use the channel to push out advertising. When Open Platform "comes out of beta", and a lot of interesting applications are built around it, the company intends to feed advertising through this outlet as well. If all goes well this is actually an extremely scalable way of increasing your ad inventory. To put it in old economy terms, imagine if you ran a newspaper and a reader went around telling people of a story he or she really liked in your paper. Ok now imagine that the reader not only passes around the story but also a little piece of advertising along with that story. Voila! Now your advertising travels independent of your actualy physical broadsheet (or Berliner). At some stage, I assume, Guardian could even send out targetted advertising through the API.
Let me explain with the help of a live Guardian API implementation. The Cass Sculpture Foundation uses Guardian content on the profile pages of individual artists. See the right side of this page on sculptor Anthony Gormley:
The news snippets with reference to Gormley is being dynamically pulled from Guardian's website. Eventually Guardian could alternate every third headline with an advertisement for art supplies, evening art classes and so on. That's targeted advertising that reaches beyond the newspaper and the Guardian website.
Secondly, a whole bunch of smart, enthusiastic developers are going to leap on the Open Platform API and use it to make products that use news content in interesting ways. And the insights won't cost Guardian a cent (penny?) in testing or development costs. And developers have already started throwing up interesting results. API Maps is matching Guardian news content with locations on a world map to create a crowd-sourced geo-tagged database of news. ContentTagger is also letting any user on the web tag articles in the Guardian database. Zemanta, an excellent blogging and emailing tool, automatically pulls relevant content from the web and lets you use it in blogposts and emails. (If you are an ardent blogger who struggles to get the perfect image or news links to support a post, I highly recommend Zemanta.) Expect to see Guardian content next time you use Zemanta. They already have a test app here.
All this can only help the online team at Guardian think up of exciting new things to do with this content on their website. All at no cost.
Finally, and if nothing else works, the API pushes out tons of branded content. With no incremental efforts besides opening up their database Guardian will probably create plenty of new consumers many of who may come back to the Guardian website and may even buy a newspaper or two.
All said and done Open Platform is an interesting initiative that media watchers should observe closely. It could tell us plenty about how to package (or not) and sell news to a new audience that is not exactly reaching for their wallets to pay for it.