How Open APIs Will Impact Journalism

In the past year, several major media producers have launched Open APIs. This move transformed printed newspapers such as The New York Times and The Guardian in online content platforms. The Open API is a heavily sought after solution to interconnect websites in a more fluid user-friendly manner. This change might create room to significantly improve the culture of Remix, a term used by Lawrence Lessig (creator of Creative Commons) and other copyright activists to describe, amongst other things, a society which allows and encourages derivative works. It also broadens the brand exposure and it’s content availability, increasing reputation. All of this comes to prove, as analysed in the book Remediation, by JD Bolter, that one media doesn’t end/finish others, but influences it until everything is reflected in a major change that affects society.

The Open APIs make possible for newspapers to be in a larger number of places at once and that might change the publications themselves, their audience and how journalism is produced and perceived. The purpose of my dissertation is to understand how this might happen, through qualitative research and a case study focused on the development of an application that will use this Open APIs. Furthermore, with the newspaper crisis, the chance that this changes can develop an economic viability for these media groups will also be investigated. The challenge in this study lies in the fact that the launch of this Open APIs happened very recently, because of that this research will rely on data gathered from available documents and formal and informal interviews and observation will be conducted to complement any findings.