Field Notes Inside an Integrated Communications Agency

I'm not a journalist by any means. I'm more of a technologist. So, I'm struck at a new marriage that seems so obvious that I'm surprised I'm hearing about it now.

The Gray Lady now has a developer API. That's right: NY Times is offering tools to developers that allow them to access information programmatically. And I'm not talking about getting RSS feeds of stories or anything that mundane. That's table stakes. NYTimes is building out the hooks for developer-journalists to access data that is otherwise difficult to obtain easily. Right now they have:

• Campaign Finance API : Presidential campaign contribution and expenditure data based on United States Federal Election Commission filings.
• Congress API: U.S. Congressional vote data, including information about specific House and Senate members.

That the Times has a developer network seems strange at first glance. They're a news source and not Yahoo!, right? But this is a natural extension of their reporting. Providing information in an unbiased fashion so that people can weigh the evidence and draw their own conclusions is part of their soul.

Some folks might argue that this isn't journalism. I wholeheartedly disagree. For me, exposing these RESTful APIs reflects a dedication to providing citizens access to content that they couldn't get otherwise. It reflects a different type of analysis, certainly, but it is motivated by the same objectives that fuel traditional journalism.

The Congress API, by the way, scrapes thomas.loc.gov, house.gov and senate.gov and makes the data accessible to anyone who wants to roll an app that can consume them.  All the dirty work of data collection and integration is abstracted from the programmer-journalist, leaving them with a well-reasoned, deliberate information source.

Oh yeah, this also is in addition to the excellent work they have done by partnering with IBM's ManyEyes visualization technology. Go to the Visualization lab and pretend you're Edward Tufte for a day.

I can't wait to see what happens with this.

Charles McGrath, in his Feb 17 New York Times article, points out that while National Public Radio's listenership is growing, PBS television, he believes, has seen it's best days, and may perhaps be no longer relevant or necessary.

I couldn't disagree more.

We now live in a climate where local printed newspapers are in sharp decline, and where the cynical irony in Fox News Channel's name and slogan goes unchallenged. Even my parent's nightly network news broadcasts have devolved into 15 minutes of entertainment interspersed between 15 minutes of drug company commercials. In this climate where journalistic integrity and high standards are the exception rather than the rule, it seems to me that shows like the News Hour with Jim Lehrer, NC Now, and Frontline are now more important than ever - certainly not less.

Despite years of siege by politicians who seem to prefer the tractibility and journalistic abdication prevalent on Britney-obsessed cable news outlets - and make no mistake, their issue with PBS is the news - PBS television remains one of the only places to get trustworthy news on television.

As McGrath points out in his article (the title is sharper than the content of the piece itself), the answer to whatever woes PBS television may be facing is more public funding, not less. It seems miraculous to me that PBS can, on pennies, continue to do what Big Corporate Media seems unable to do with all it's billions of dollars. In truth, perhaps the absence of billions is the secret of PBS' success. But while we wait for more public funding for PBS television, that miracle has an earthly foundation.