Jeff Jarvis writes on a really interesting development at The Guardian which could be a major part of the solution that newspapers are looking for to rescue them from dwindling circulations and ad revenues. The paper is following suit with a few other organisations like the BBC and New York Times in releasing an API for its content.
This means that the owners and publishers of other websites will be able to embed Guardian content within their own sites – therefore, the Guardian reaches out to a broader range of potential readers and stands to draw them to its own website if they want to ‘read more’ of a trailed piece. To see this in action visit this page of the Cass Sculpture Foundation website – down the right hand side you will see articles from The Guardian relating to the subject of the page, in this case sculptor Antony Gormley.
As Jarvis discusses, this approach points to a completely different philosophy of what a newspaper is about. It’s no longer about owning the medium (the printed paper), but being woven into the fabric of the wider Internet. Radical stuff and anathema to conventional thinking in newspaper publishing, but the industry is at a point that it has to rethink its fundamentals and this idea has a real ring of truth about it.
