The Modern Journalist

APIs And Conversations: The Real Canary In The Coal Mine

“The canary in the coal mine.”

That’s how Jeff Jarvis describes the Twitter-verse in relationship to news organizations. He’s thesis: every news agency should be using this type of service — the mobile network where people can distribute 140-character messages to large groups of readers via text message — to track down breaking news, find sources and communicate with a decentralized group of readers.

It’s a great idea in theory, one that I’ve written about on the site. But there’s more to developing this network than simply adhoc’ing it. But I’m jumping ahead of myself.

The first step for most media companies is to realize that they need to be listening to the meta-conversations that are happening. Right now, that’s not happening. Only 29 percent of companies are listening to conversations and 17 percent are ignoring the social media sphere completely.

I see the coal mine, but not the canary.

Let’s assume, though, that media companies eventually realize that they need to be involved in the social media sphere in some manner, shape or form. The question is two-fold: how do they interact with their readers and how much do they open up their content to programmers?

The answer to the first question is simple: you interact exactly as if you were having a conversation with the readers and you create rules that decentralize power for moderation.

Dan Schultz recently wrote a good post about running online communities. The premise is simple: collect eyeballs, give incentives for posting and create personalization for users.

If media outlets build a system that does this with the correct tool set, monitoring the social conversation becomes much easier because much of it will take place through your own site. And with widgets and plug-ins, companies can actually see where conversations are taking place outside the site, giving them insight from their most valued users.

The answer to the second question is also simple: you turn over as much as you possibly can without giving away company secrets.

The press is falling all over itself at the New York Times decision to release an API, which is a series of protocols that programmers can use to build new software applications that can be used with information created by the newspaper.

It’s a great move by the paper, but hardly revolutionary. Technology companies have been doing this for years, and the fact that Times move has spurred so much conversations indicates exactly how far behind newspapers are in the modern world.

It’ll be quite interesting to see how far the Times goes with this experiment given its history. For those who don’t know, the Times is famous for telling people that it’s not news until the Times writes about it.

In the modern world, that’s hardly the case.

Technology companies should watch with a skeptical eye to see exactly how far the Times — and other newspaper companies — are willing to go to engage their readers and invite outside programmers to develop tools for their site.

That’s the real canary in the coal mine. If the Times fails by clamping down on those who build applications its editors don’t like, it’s likely other papers will follow suit.

And that would signal a serious problem for the industry.