Today, The London Guardian, one of the best newspapers in the world, has released a means for web developers to access, remix, manipulate, and mash up the Guardian’s massive library of daily news, features, and images.  How?  With an API.

What’s an API and why should you care?

API stands for “application programming interface” (And, no… don’t pronounce it “appy.”  Not cool.)

In the most non-technical terms:  an API is all the technical junk* that’s needed for developers to take information from one place send it through the intertubes and have it pop up somewhere else in a very different format.

* programming routines, data structures, libraries and operating systems services, object classes (and no, I have no clue any of what that is either… this is what application developers are for.)

The Guardian has two primary products in their “The Open Platform“:

The Content API is a mechanism for getting Guardian content.  You can query our content database for articles and then get full content back in formats that are particularly useful for integration with other internet applications.

The Data Store is a collection of important and high quality data sets curated by Guardian editors.  You can find useful data here, download it, and integrate it with other internet applications.

The Guardian isn’t the only newspaper doing this.  The venerable New York Times has a team working on API’s as well.  If you want to stay up-to-date as they release new API’s for various sets of information, they have an open-source technology blog.

Here is what Marshal Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb said on the day NYT launched their API:

Reporting is no longer a scarce commodity.  It’s hard for these huge news organizations to do it faster, cheaper, or even as well as a whole web of new media producers around the world.  They may be among the top sources for original content still today, but considering the direction technology is moving in; that’s not a safe bet for the future.

My take

Newspapers with a open-source API can now also charge developers (with commercial intent) for access to their information and eventually newspapers can require all users of the API to join their advertising network. In other words, newspapers are creating new ways to charge for the information they professionally produce.  It’s a good sign.  I think it means newspapers are evolving.  Respected analyst  Jeremiah Owyang of Forrester Research has more ideas on how the Guardian API can be used.