Twitter  Study from Newspaper Association of America finds papers engage readers more effectively than other media. nie.mn/XENPs3  
Nieman Journalism Lab
Pushing to the future of journalism — A project of the Nieman Foundation at Harvard

USA Today toys with a side business: selling commercial access to its data

The newspaper is also lifting restrictions on its popular census data API.

One year ago, USA Today opened up its massive database of articles, reviews, census figures, and sports salaries to the public. The newspaper provided open and well-documented APIs to software developers, but access was limited to personal and noncommercial use.

Last week the newspaper quietly changed that, offering commercial licensing of its data on a case-by-case basis. Premium licenses would remove rate limits and caps for data-hungry programs, too. That means USA Today can make money selling its data and app developers can make money using it.

The newspaper also lifted commercial restrictions from its collection of census data, one of its most popular APIs. While the data is publicly available, USA Today assembled it from multiple sources and structured it in a predictable, developer-friendly way.

Stephen Kurtz, the newspaper’s vice president of digital development, said the move is in response to requests from developers looking to build paid apps with USA Today’s data. “Most of them are mom-and-pop shop — two guys in a garage, or one guy in a garage — mashing up our content with other content. The reviews APIs are really popular, and they’ve been mashed up with other open APIs out there, like the Netflix API, for example,” he told me.

“We encourage that, and they give us good feedback of what they’d like to see and how they would like the API to grow. So for us, it’s very symbiotic.”

Kurtz said he has not decided on a standard pricing model — he wants to gauge demand first.

It’s an intriguing side business, another way for the paper to profit from its deep well of content. Plus, it puts the USA Today brand in more places. In a blog post, developer Ethan Hamlin explained it this way:

Our developer service was launched with the hope of expanding the ways people discover, engage with and communicate about USA TODAY content, and we view this as an important next step.

Both the Articles and Reviews APIs offer robust methods to access USA TODAY story briefs dating back to 2004. In exchange for opening these APIs to the public, we hope to increase our web audience via referrals back to our pages…

The Guardian, with its Open Platform, is the only other major newspaper I know of that offers the “freemium” model of access: free access to headlines and article excerpts; free access to full articles with embedded advertising; and paid access to articles with no advertising or data caps. (The Guardian’s Hack Day 2011 is today, by the way.)

The New York Times also provides extensive, well-documented APIs but no paid access to full article content. NPR provides an open API but grants full access only to dues-paying member stations.

Kurtz said he plans to release new APIs in the coming year, including for presidential polling data. Developers could build something like electoral-vote.com that automatically pulls in polling data, for example. Kurtz also plans to release an API covering years of data on the Olympic Games, which could be particularly lucrative for app developers next summer.

Kurtz is still deciding whether to charge for premium access to those datasets. “We’ll hopefully lean to be open when we can, but we also understand the value of this data,” he said. “I have to be honest with you — we’re kind of stepping into this, seeing what the demand is, and then I’m sure we’ll evolve our model from there.”

                                   
What to read next
yankeestadiumcc
Justin Ellis    April 11, 2013
As audiences find new ways to enjoy sports content, companies like ESPN, Vox Media, and NBC Sports are competing with the leagues, conferences, and teams they cover to deliver games, news, and alerts on new platforms.
  • Patrick Beeson

    This is a fantastic idea, and one I’ve been championing for awhile now. Of course, Django-wonderkund Adrian Holovaty said it best back in September 2006 with his blog entry “A fundamental way newspaper sites need to change” http://www.holovaty.com/writing/fundamental-change/

    This idea only works if the newspaper or media company devotes resources to cleaning up what is otherwise very dirty data, and/or, invests in a content management system that can organize their data correctly going forward.

    Local news sites are at a disadvantage here since it’s less likely developers will have an interest, or business case, to mash their data with a scalable app.

    In any case, this is a step in the right direction for USA Today.

  • lelapin

    “… it allows for experimentation outside the traditional confines of the publication itself — and that can generate valuable ideas and feedback. ” - Mathew Ingram Gigaom.com

  • Ronald W. Gumbs

    Free Market Capitalism is the only route to prosperity for 1% and poverty for 99%.

  • http://www.ddmcd.com Dennis D. McDonald

    I don’t mind people selling data about my relationship with a media property — as long as I get my cut. See “Identity Theft and the Licensing of Personal Information”  http://www.ddmcd.com/managing-technology/identity-theft-and-the-licensing-of-personal-information.html which I published in 2005.

  • http://twitter.com/javaun Javaun Moradi

    Hi Andrew, just to clarify, the NPR API is fully open to the public, as long as it is used non-commercially. All story text, audio, and images (where we have distribution rights) are available to everyone. Stations may sell sponsorship against NPR content retrieved via the API, but other API users may not.

    Javaun Moradi, Product Manager, NPR API

  • Shafqat

    Fantastic initiative from USA Today. One of the most surprising aspects of our business was how antiquated most syndication technologies are at newspapers today (FTP anyone?).

    We ended up licensing our API platform to many large publishers and now create content APIs largely overnight. A year ago, we were often met with curious stares. But there has been a significant shift in strategy, and the interest in APIs has been 10X due to the innovation at NPR, Guardian, USA Today etc. Don’t be surprised if you hear about most major newspapers and magazines launching their APIs in the next few months.

    @Patrcik – agreed that data cleanup and organization is important, but there are tools and services to help with that (no need to reinvent). Also, for local news sites even if there isn’t much third party developer interest, an API can help speed up internal product development and innovation.
http://www.niemanlab.org/2011/10/usa-today-toys-with-a-side-business-selling-commercial-access-to-its-data/
www.niemanlab.org
crawl=CC-MAIN-2013-20
67149
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:LI7I54AQWRHWOOQ6FL3Z5Q7LOBY3THRY
<urn:uuid:4d77a405-dfb2-4227-86c2-0f64ad0890fd>
2013-05-25T01:25:04Z
216.92.13.127
sha1:3VXCMGJ3INHE6FHQKBG2E2OPXGK2MIY3
<urn:uuid:2bc2e15f-cf8e-4ad6-b360-378db70bb36d>
http://www.niemanlab.org/2011/10/usa-today-toys-with-a-side-business-selling-commercial-access-to-its-data/
response
<urn:uuid:b4bdd07f-953a-4384-a446-0094d6730c06>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2013-20
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web with URLs provided by Blekko for Spring 2013
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf