Accelerating News Integration in Automatic Knowledge Extraction Ecosystems: an API-first Outlook

TL;DR

This paper surveys recent API-driven news systems and discusses how API-first development and automatic knowledge extraction are shaping the future of journalism and news content integration.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive survey of news APIs and introduces two disruptive trends—API-first methodologies and knowledge extraction—that will influence future news ecosystems.

Findings

APIs have significantly impacted news product development.

API-first approaches are poised to accelerate news content integration.

Knowledge extraction will enhance automated news analysis.

Abstract

Leveraging Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) has been widely acknowledged as a valuable approach to software and system design that have promoted the acceleration of products and services development by allowing the decoupling of interface design from service implementation details. Many organizations in the news and journalism industry have adopted and promoted this API oriented approach. In the first part of this paper, we provide a survey of the most significant recent work around traditional news and journalistic open APIs and how these have been influenced by and impacted the news product landscape. In the second part of the paper, we identify two disruptive technology trends that we believe will impact the role and value of news/journalism products in the future: API-first development methodologies, and the increased role of news-supported automatic knowledge extraction and analytic services. We anticipate that these two driving forces will create a new wave of adoption, open collaboration, standardization and overall progress in news content adoption in knowledge platforms. We provide a brief overview of our experience in this area at Dow Jones.