Seeing as how I’m going to be working for the Times this summer, I’ve put in a bit of thinking about the role of news, newspapers, and journalism in today’s hyperconnected world. The death of paper newsletters has been predicted for a while now, but strangely enough, they are still around. Wired Magazine, in their 15-year anniversary retrospect, highlighted one of their unfulfilled visions: “The Death of Media”. Wired called for the death of “Old Media” over and over again, but Old Media is still around, and rumors of their death are exaggerated…for now.

The physical medium of a newspaper is convenient for a lot of people - mostly the older generation that is used to physical paper. But, as the younger generation takes control, the physical medium, I think, will die a quick death. Then, what is a newspaper, without the paper? Well, a team of trained journalists and editors who provide really high quality content, and some more.

Well, what, exactly? When any blogger can provide “news”, the Times does have some competition. What can their team of reporters and editors accomplish? That sort of concentrated talent can really focus on all eight of the “Better Than Free” generatives listed by Kevin Kelly (founding editor of Wired). At this point, the paper version of the Times already provides:

• Interpretation - The Times always has excellent commentary by informed experts.
• Authenticity - Who are you going to trust more: Joe Schmoe Blogger, or, the Times? No contest.
• Findability - Any edition of the Times is packed with content you probably aren’t interested in, but there are certainly gems you don’t know you care about. Finding those is really valuable.
• Embodiment - Some people will pay for a thick heavy paper copy of the Sunday Edition, so they can lounge around all day, and just work their way slowly through all the stories. Let them eat cake.

What about the other four? Well, the online version of the Times, nytimes.com, fulfills these, but there is room for improvement:

• Personalization - my.nytimes.com covers this, although I’m not quite satisfied with the implementation. This is a Hard Problem however, so I can’t fault them.
• Accessibility - This is a relatively simple solution with the appropriate technologies, and a proper API (see below)
• Patronage - Don’t mistake this for a subscription. If the content is free, but readers have the opportunity to pay a small amount after reading a story they really enjoyed, the feeling is completely different. And the Times gets real, valuable feedback, to boot.
• Immediacy - no argument: nytimes.com can present news a lot faster than a dead-tree edition. Not just over the Web to your computer, but to your phone, or to any other systems where you need it.

What caught my eye recently is the announcement that the Times will provide an API - a programmatic way to get access to their stories, ratings, and other structured content. This is a great move, because it allows anyone to use the free data, and it proves the Times gets it - anyone should have access to the data, because only the Times can provide the added value of Kelly’s generatives.

(Strangely enough, I couldn’t find an official announcement for the API - not on open.nytimes.com, not on code.nytimes.com, and not on Google: “nytimes api” leads back to the ReadWriteWeb article.)

What would really rock my boat is for the Times to integrate Reuters’ OpenCalais semantic web application - giving access to the data to programmers (via the API) is a good thing, but the machines need access too. OpenCalais takes unstructured text (such as a Times article) and returns RDF-structured semantic data consumable by web crawlers and information agents.

All this progress is exciting, and I hope to get a glimpse of more efforts this summer. I start next week, and while I may be working on something else, I’ll keep a close eye on anything going on in this space.