In May announced its intention to build an Application Programming Interface for its data. MediaBistro quoted Aron Pilhofer:

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

More details, if they can be called that:

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.”

I haven’t heard anything since then, although the article mentioned that something would be ready “in a matter of weeks.”

Today I spent some time reading the API documentation for National Public Radio.

That’s right, NPR has an API. (mmm, I love my alphabet soup.)

NPR’s API provides a flexible, powerful way to access your favorite NPR content, including audio from most NPR programs dating back to 1995 as well as text, images and other web-only content from NPR and NPR member stations. This archive consists of over 250,000 stories that are grouped into more than 5,000 different aggregations.

You can get results from Topics, Music Genres, Programs, Bios, Music Artists, Columns and Series in XML, RSS, MediaRSS, JSON, and Atom or through HTML and JavaScript widgets.

Now, I’m a bit of an NPR junkie, so I’m thinking of ways to access all this information for my personal use. And I can see how it could be useful as an internal product for NPR.

But how would another news organization use this? Oh wait, they can’t:

The API is for personal, non-commercial use, or for noncommercial online use by a nonprofit corporation which is exempt from federal income taxes under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code.

This one doesn’t make sense either:

Content from the API must be used for non-promotional, internet-based purposes only. Uses can include desktop gadgets, blog posts and widgets, but must not include e-newsletters.

And way down at the bottom of the page is a huge block of text describing excluded content. Boooo.

Check out these blog posts from Inside NPR.org, where they explain some of their decisions.

I think this was a great first step, but if you’re gonna jump on the bandwagon, make sure you don’t miss and land on the hitch.

Further, really understand what purpose this bandwagon has. If you’re going to free your data, free it! Let people and news organizations use it (always with a link back) for all kinds of crazy things. Remember kids, sharing is caring!

Zac Echola reminded me yesterday what this blog is about and why I started it.

• 1. A networking blog should be a living document of your professional self. You should stay focused on topics that matter to people who may hire you. You should start reading blogs from people in your field.
• 2. When someone makes you think, you should think out loud on your site. Have a conversation with others. Email people questions. Chat with them on twitter. Get to know people. Working a blog isn’t much different than working a room at a conference. Stay focused.
• 3. Show off your work. When you do something good, show it off. Don’t be bashful.
• 4. SEO the crap out of yourself.
• 5. Seize every opportunity you can.
• 6. Always remember that there’s a real human being on the other side of the machine.

I’ve been really bad at updating lately, and I’m going to work hard to fix that, starting with a bunch of updates on what I’ve been doing lately. I think short posts are preferred, so I’ll split things up. Keep an eye out for stuff on Twitter, Google Maps, Django and more.

I know I haven’t been posting much lately, but I’ve been completely swamped.

Thanks to Matt Waite’s brilliance and patience, I got Django installed on my MacBook. I haven’t actually done much more than order the book and start reading through the tutorial and documentation, but I’m really excited to start learning. Right now I’m stuck trying to get MySQL onto the laptop. I’m Terminal-retarded, so this is getting frustrating. Once I get that up and running, I’ll be diving into a Django-driven class project.

My independent study project has advanced to the data cleaning stage. I’m still gathering the last bits in, but I started cleaning and organizing and staring blankly at numbers.

Life at The Alligator isn’t particularly impressive lately. We’re still mostly fixing. I slapped this little map of upcoming Gainesville shows together last week. Then I had to spend 3 hours trying to get it to work with the publishing system. It’s still kind of broken. But on the bright side, Ken Schwencke, a journalism student who is several levels beyond my programming abilities, has joined my staff.

I’m reading “Time Enough for Love,” and these quotes struck me as being more journalism-related than not.

What are the facts? Again and again and again - what are the facts? Shun wishful thinking, ignore divine revelation, forget what “the stars foretell,” avoid opinion, care not what the neighbors think, never mind the unguessable “verdict of history” - what are the facts, and to how many decimal places? You pilot always into an unknown future; facts are your single cue. Get the facts!

Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house.

That is all.

I’ve written about editing before, in terms of design, importance, and my advanced editing class. But I’d like to dig back down through some of my notes on diversity, ageism, sexism, bias, ethics, taste etc.

One of the first things that we discussed was verifying stories.

An editor hears about a great story for the next days’ paper. There is only one source for the story and no names, no way to double-check the facts. But oh, god, it’s a good story. And there’s no real reason for your source to lie to you, is there?

But man, does your paper look dumb when readers start calling in. My view on the issue:

There is a risk to be taken if the story is important enough. Otherwise, sit on it.
One way to handle this might be to take advantage of the casual atmosphere of the Internet. Maybe you paper has a blog or a forum. Post your unverified story there, and let the community help you verify or deny it. Or make a space especially for rumors.

Next up: hyper local journalism. This is especially topical with the recent breakdown of Backfence.

One of the things that seems to be left out of journalism classes is basic business sense. While it is important to learn as many different ways to tell stories as possible, the trend of this transition to the Internet suggests that journalists also need to know how to monetize their stories, perhaps how to survive as a freelancer.

Hyper local news sites are breaking down the barrier between “journalist” and “reader”, but dealing with the same problems as every other news site: monetization, advertising, ethics and quality.

The best advice to take from the hyper local trend is “Think like a user, not a publisher.” This is something that must be considered at every stage: from building the site to writing articles, to allowing users to post comments, articles and pictures.

Tomorrow: Stories that don’t get told, journalism and math.

Classes in Review Series
Preview

Last semester, I took Editing as part of my course load. It was less demanding than some of my other classes, and time limitations meant that I didn’t give the subject the attention it deserves. I tried to make up for that by taking Advanced Editing during this first half of the summer.

In the Editing class, the emphasis is on grammar, punctuation and word choice. The professor gave us articles to “fix.” Many of the errors were inconsistencies, fact errors, awkward wording and the like. We also did a little bit of page layout on dummy sheets, and cutting down AP wire stories. Less integral to the class, but more interesting, were topics of diversity, ageism, sexism, bias, ethics and taste.

These are the issues that we have discussed in the Advanced Editing class.

The advantage of this class is that it is very small, (at least in the summer, we had only 11 students) which allows for greater freedom of class discussion. The professor would hand out an article or case study and we would discuss the issues as a group. We talked about verifying sources, making up information, copying press releases, critical thinking and journalists and math.

Recognizing these issues and grasping the “big picture” behind a story is what being an editor is all about. But it’s also what being a reporter should be about.

Being an “online” kinda gal, I’d rather be out shooting video, making Flash presentations or putting together a database than managing people and editing articles. But the chance to discuss the issues that editors face everyday has been invaluable, and I think that my future work will be better because of it. These problems are not unique to print journalism. They need to be addressed in other forms of media as well.

Advanced Editing wasn’t a required course, it was a choice I made because every puzzle piece counts. If I could stay in school long enough to take courses in layout, photography and business, I would. Sadly, I’ve only got one year left. But until they kick me outta here, I’m going to scrape together as many puzzle pieces as I can. They will make me a better journalist, but even more importantly, I think they will make me a better person.

Last week in class we talked about the way Web site popularity and growth is measured. Advertising agencies want to know how many people visit your site before they pay you for advertising space. Thus, pageviews, a way to measure how many people click over to a page on your site.

With technologies such as ajax becoming very popular among Web sites, pageviews become an obsolete measurement. Instead of loading a new page, new content is loaded dynamically.

So how do we measure growth and popularity?

In class, we said: time.

And so does Nielsen.

The two major firms that track Internet traffic are playing down the significance of ranking Web sites by “page views,” the number of pages viewed on a given Web property each month. Instead, they are offering other metrics, such as time spent or visits.

But there are problems with that, too. I can open up a tab in Firefox (or, now, IE7) and totally forget about it. It’s still counting how much time I’m spending on that site. I get most of my news and daily reading via RSS. No time measuring there.

So, in the movement from “static web” to “dynamic web” what metric system can we rely on?

P.S. These metrics aren’t just used by advertisers. I check my site and RSS stats regularly to see how you all respond to me and to test changes to the site.

I took a look at Google Trends today, a feature of Google Reader that tracks how many feeds you read, what time of day you read them, active and inactive subscriptions, and what you read most, star most, and share most.

Unfortunately, my reading technique skews the results so that only the inactive/active trend is of any use to me.

You see, with 101 subscriptions (down from 115 due to inactive) I usually read my feeds in list view. I scroll through this list by hitting the spacebar, which opens and then marks as read the item in question. This means that EVERYTHING is technically “read.”

Now, there are a few ways I could alter my reading behavior so that it wouldn’t skew my trends. (uncheck mark as read and mark each item I actually read as read individually, for one) But they also slow me down.

The problem becomes speed vs accuracy. And my lack of time management skills trumps my curiosity, in this case.

So long, Google Trends, and thanks for all the…

My co-workers at the Help Desk like to get their news online. We were talking about an article on the New York Times Web site, when someone highlighted a paragraph and inadvertently double-clicked.

Apparently, when you double-click on a word in an article, it opens a pop-up window with the definition of the word.

A neat feature, no doubt, but it isn’t made obvious that this will happen. A lot of people highlight as they read to keep track of where they are, and clicking inadvertently could be confusing and irritating.

So, please NYT, give me the option of turning that nonsense off.

The Setup:

Much of what I’ve read since I started blogging (and thereby reading more online journalism blogs) says that journalists and students of journalism should blog. But according to a survey conducted by my editing teacher, out of 60 or so students (three sections) only about 5 blog.

The Problem:

My cash costs for this blog are almost nil, but the time cost is heavy. I try to post at least once a day, and that means coming up with a post idea (usually through my RSS feeds or classes), how to approach it, searching for references and relevant information, writing the post, coming up with a title (headlines are my weakness), and editing. I’m also constantly looking for ways to improve the site as a whole, via design or information.

The Solution?

Tumblr

A “Tumblelog” is The Flash compared to traditional blogging. Each post will have a different format based on what information you’re posting: a longer blog post, a photograph or graphic, a quotation, a link, a conversation, or a video. You don’t have to write commentary, there are no comments to check. Just post and go.

Even better, the Tumblr bookmarklet automatically detects what kind of site you’re on and will format the post accordingly. I’m assuming this auto-detect isn’t perfect, so you can change the type easily as well.

You can also set Tumblr up to directly publish posts from an RSS feed or your cellphone.

Maybe not:

Here’s the drawback: no comments = no community. If you follow the theory that journalism needs to get ueber-local, and journalists need to learn how to participate in their communities, maybe Tumblr isn’t the solution for the time-bound. Maybe you should just take a few extra seconds to post to a blog that does allow comments. Maybe the time investment is worth the possibility of mind-opening and engaging conversation; building your own community.

Something Different:

Perhaps the challenge lies in the format. How long is a story, anyway?

P.S. This post took me about two hours. I had help on the details on Tumblr from Lifehacker.