Journalism and APIs are bound together in ways that go to the heart of the politics of information, and I’ve watched the relationship deepen and complicate over fifteen years. On one side, news organizations are API providers, exposing their content and data through APIs and pioneering some of the most thoughtful API practices in the industry. On the other side, journalists are API consumers, using platform APIs to research, investigate, and hold power accountable — which makes API access a press-freedom issue. And underneath both is the deeper political reality that APIs increasingly govern what information is accessible, to whom, and on what terms — which is precisely the terrain journalism exists to navigate. The politics of journalism and APIs is the politics of who can access the information that democracy depends on.
The news industry was an early and serious API pioneer, and I covered that pioneering work closely. NPR, the New York Times, the Guardian, and USA Today all built APIs early, and they did it thoughtfully. I wrote in 2011 about the news industry doing R&D with open APIs, and about rethinking the NPR API ecosystem — NPR’s “COPE” (Create Once, Publish Everywhere) approach was genuinely influential, demonstrating how a content API could let a news organization distribute its journalism across every platform from a single source. The Guardian’s Open Platform, which I reviewed in 2014 as the state of APIs in journalism, was one of the best content APIs anywhere — open, well-designed, and built on a genuine belief in the value of openness. These news organizations understood, earlier than most industries, that their content was an asset that an API could distribute, syndicate, and extend, and they built API programs that the rest of the industry could learn from.
The content-control politics that news APIs surfaced are instructive, because journalism has to balance openness against the commercial value of its content. I wrote in 2012 about NPR adding content permission controls to its API — the recognition that a news organization opening its content through an API still needs to govern who can use what, and how, because the content has both public-interest value and commercial value. This is the central tension of news APIs: journalism wants its reporting to reach as many people as possible, but news organizations also need to sustain themselves financially, and the API is where those two imperatives meet. The permission controls, the rights management, the licensing — these are the politics of news content access expressed through the API layer. How open a news API is, and on what terms, reflects how the organization resolves the tension between public mission and commercial survival.
The most politically charged dimension is journalists as API consumers, because platform API access has become essential to investigative and accountability journalism. I wrote in 2017 about the importance of APIs in journalism right then — at exactly the moment when journalists’ ability to research social media platforms through their APIs was becoming critical to understanding disinformation, political manipulation, and the behavior of the platforms themselves. Journalists used platform APIs to investigate, to gather evidence, to hold the powerful accountable. And this is precisely why the platform API lockdowns I’ve documented are a press-freedom issue: when Facebook, Twitter, and others restricted their APIs, they cut off the journalists and researchers who were using that access to scrutinize them. The Facebook Audience Insights API that was quietly deprecated after being used in election targeting is a perfect example — the very access that would let journalists investigate platform behavior is the access platforms have an interest in restricting. The politics here are stark: API access is a tool for holding power accountable, which gives the powerful a strong incentive to limit it.
Data journalism turned APIs and machine-readable data into a core practice of modern reporting, and the accountability stakes are high. The Washington Post’s investigation into police shootings, which I wrote about in 2018, used GitHub and machine-readable data to do data journalism in the open — making the underlying data available so the reporting could be verified and built upon. This is APIs and open data serving journalism’s accountability function directly: rigorous, data-driven, transparent reporting that lets the public check the work. Data journalism depends on access to data — government data, platform data, public records — much of it accessed through APIs, and the openness or closedness of that data through APIs directly shapes what journalism can investigate. When data is locked up, accountability journalism is constrained; when it’s accessible through APIs, journalism can hold power to account with evidence.
The algorithmic transparency thread is where I’ve connected journalism and APIs most explicitly to democratic accountability. I argued in 2016 that if an algorithm impacts our lives, it should be opened up with an API for auditing — so that journalists, researchers, and regulators can scrutinize the algorithms that increasingly govern what we see, what we’re offered, and how we’re treated. This is the API as an instrument of accountability journalism in its most forward-looking form: the algorithms that shape public discourse, that decide what content spreads, that determine who sees what, should be auditable through APIs so that journalism can investigate them. The politics of this is enormous, because the platforms whose algorithms most need scrutiny are exactly the ones least willing to expose them. The fight over algorithmic transparency through APIs is, in significant part, a fight over whether journalism will be able to hold the most powerful information systems accountable.
The throughline I keep returning to is that the politics of journalism and APIs is fundamentally about access to the information democracy requires. News organizations as API providers wrestle with how open to be with their content. Journalists as API consumers depend on access to platform and government data to do accountability work, and that access is constantly threatened by the powerful interests it scrutinizes. And the deeper question — whether the algorithms and platforms that increasingly govern public information will be accessible enough for journalism to investigate — is one of the defining press-freedom issues of the API age. I’ve emphasized the politics of APIs precisely because journalism makes those politics concrete: APIs determine what can be known, reported, and held accountable, and a healthy democracy needs the information access that open APIs provide and that closed platforms threaten. The relationship between journalism and APIs is, in the end, a relationship about power and information — who has access to the truth, and who gets to control that access. That’s journalism’s eternal beat, and APIs have become one of its most important battlegrounds.
References
- Why A Tech Journalist Cares About Your API
- Rethinking The NPR API Ecosystem
- News Industry R&D With Open APIs
- NPR Adds Content Permission Control To Their API
- State Of APIs In Journalism: The Guardian
- If An Algorithm Impacts Our Life It Should Be Opened Up With An API For Auditing
- The Importance Of APIs In Journalism Right Now
- New York Times Manages Their OpenAPI Using GitHub
- The Data Behind The Washington Post Story On Police Shootings In 2017
- An Emphasis On The Politics Of APIs
