A post on mediabistro.com, New York Times Joining the Social Networking Fray, says that the New York Times will release an API that “will allow users to ‘mash-up’ the NYT’s data — think layers on Google Maps.” The post quotes Aron Pilhofer, editor of interactive news, as saying that their goal is to “make the NYT programmable. Everything we produce should be organized data.”

This is good news. The newspaper business continues to lay off staff and offer buyouts as they predict declining revenues. These are talented and trained reporters, photo journalists and editors who do the hard work of discovering and writing the news. What they do can not be, and should not be, crowdsourced. The Times has the resources and experience to do this right. If they can show how to make up for some of the losses with innovations in their online presence, it will help the entire newspaper business by showing a way forward.

(Spotted on ReadWriteWeb)

Related posts:

1. Blogrunner: the New York Times robot in the newsroom
2. Twine in the New York Times
3. New York Times publishes Linked Open Data
4. New York Times editorializes about the Google search ranking algorithm
5. 3scale provides infrastructure of the programmable web