Building the stacks for a mutualised newspaper

Building the stacks for a mutualised newspaper

Dr Chris Thorpe

BUILDING THE STACKS FOR A MUTUALISED NEWSPAPER

For those of you who were at FOWA last year you’ll remember that Kevin Rose of Digg gave a talk on the future of online news, today I’m going to be talking about the future of online news as seen from within another “startup” in this space, The Guardian. We are kind of like a startup at the moment as the structural pressure and disruption in this space is making us reinvent things. But we have to think a lot about our audience and our legacy.


HTTP://WWW.FLICKR.COM/PHOTOS/JAGGEREE/

In our building at Kings Cross which we’re reminded of the past and tradition everywhere with historical objects and this wonderful facsimile of the first edition of The Manchester Guardian.



And in many ways this looks like a newspaper of today. It has articles that remind us of previous difficult financial times



It has adverts, although I’m not sure we run many truss adverts these days



and it has a cover price


HTTP://WWW.FLICKR.COM/PHOTOS/FOURWALKS/

printing press to clouds and wires

but what’s changed?and what needs tochange

and although clouds and wires are how the majority of our readership gets their news from us rather than the print edition, what’s changed from the days of the printing press


HTTP://WWW.FLICKR.COM/PHOTOS/FOURWALKS/

but what’s changed?and what needs tochange

printing press to clouds and wires

and in many ways in times of massive structural change in the industry, what needs to change


HTTP://WWW.FLICKR.COM/PHOTOS/LWR/

creationfabricationdistributionmonetisation

the newspaper as we know it is a product of the industrial age, an age in which the majority of mass produced goods of which newspapers and other mass media are examples could be described by these four words



HTTP://FPC.DOS.STATE.FL.US/GENERAL/N035050.JPG


firstly let’s talk about physical printed newspapersthis is the Miami Herald newsroom in the 1950s


HTTP://WWW.FLICKR.COM/PHOTOS/BENTERRETT/


and although our new printing presses are bigger and more automated they’re still a direct line descendent from the Stanhope press that printed the first edition


HTTP://WWW.FLICKR.COM/PHOTOS/PICTURING_IT/


and we still distribute to outlets


HTTP://WWW.FLICKR.COM/PHOTOS/SLIMJIM/


and out from those outlets to street corners and homes in a distribution network we can sometimes brand and claim


HTTP://WWW.FLICKR.COM/PHOTOS/JAYCOXFILM/


in some cultures there are local drop off points


HTTP://WWW.FLICKR.COM/PHOTOS/JAYCOXFILM/


and hyperlocal drop off points on the drive, in the mailbox or by the front door,



and clearly there is monetisation on the print edition in the cover price, adverts and paid supplements

so how does it change in the digital era, the newpaper made of bits, what are its current metaphors for creation, fabrication and distribution




actually our current digital newsroom looks a lot like the 1950 Miami Herald’s, there are more Macs obviously



we have a wonderful offset printing press, it’s R2 our Content Management System, it’s a faster than a physical printing press and allows us to create in theory an infinite number of printings every day, but it does the same task



And we have our own distribution network with our collection of sites



we have local delivery through “full fat” RSS feeds



and we have hyperlocal on mobile



and we’re part of digital versions of newsagents, news aggregators



and there is monetisation through adverts


disruption

but we are living in a time of mass disruption of the mass media industry, a disruption borne of the economic climate, the reduction of advertising efficacy and spend and also due to changes in user behaviours and intents


HTTP://WWW.INTERNET-MANIFESTO.ORG/

people are writing well thought out manifestos that many people are reading


09/09/2009 11:37Goodbye to the Age of Newspapers (Hello to a New Era of Corruption)

Page 1 of 27http://www.tnr.com/print/article/goodbye-the-age-newspapers-hello-new-era-corruption

Paul Starr March 4, 2009 | 12:00 am

Published on The New Republic (http://www.tnr.com)

Goodbye to the Age of Newspapers(Hello to a New Era of Corruption)Why American politics and society are about to be changed for the worse.

I.

We take newspapers for granted. They have been so integral a part of daily life

in America, so central to politics and culture and business, and so powerful and

profitable in their own right, that it is easy to forget what a remarkable historical

invention they are. Public goods are notoriously under-produced in the

marketplace, and news is a public good--and yet, since the mid-nineteenth

century, newspapers have produced news in abundance at a cheap price to readers

and without need of direct subsidy. More than any other medium, newspapers

have been our eyes on the state, our check on private abuses, our civic alarm

systems. It is true that they have often failed to perform those functions as well as

they should have done. But whether they can continue to perform them at all is

now in doubt.

Even before the recession hit, the newspaper industry was facing a mortal threat

from the rise of the Internet, falling circulation and advertising revenue, and a

long-term decline in readership, as the habit of buying a daily paper dwindled

from one generation to the next. The recession has intensified these difficulties,

plunging newspapers into a tailspin from which some may not recover and others

will emerge only as a shadow of their former selves. The devastation is already

substantial. At the Los Angeles Times, the cumulative effect of cutbacks has been to

reduce its newsroom by one-half--and that was before its parent company,

HTTP://WWW.TNR.COM/ARTICLE/GOODBYE-THE-AGE-NEWSPAPERS-HELLO-NEW-ERA-CORRUPTION

Some people are suggesting that there is a dystopian future for newspapers and people are talking about the political and societal consequences of that happening

The challenges facing mass media go far deeper in many ways than the current financial climate and difficulties in the advertising industry,


HTTP://TWITTER.COM/MCCOMB/STATUS/3837637942

and mass media bolt on solutions to the problem will possibly not be the solution

in 1991 the very missed Douglas Adams wrote very presciently about the cause of the disruption we’re seeing

“During [the twentieth] century we have for the first time been dominated by non-interactive forms of entertainment: cinema, radio, recorded music and television. Before they came along all entertainment was interactive: theatre, music, sport—the performers and audience were there together, and even a respectfully silent audience exerted a powerful shaping presence on the unfolding of whatever drama they were there for. We didn’t need a special word for interactivity in the same way that we don’t (yet) need a special word for people with only one head.”Douglas Adams


HTTP://WWW.FLICKR.COM/PHOTOS/TPHOLLAND/

“During [the twentieth] century we have for the first time been dominated by non-interactive forms of entertainment: cinema, radio, recorded music and television. Before they came along all entertainment was interactive: theatre, music, sport—the performers and audience were there together, and even a respectfully silent audience exerted a powerful shaping presence on the unfolding of whatever drama they were there for. We didn’t need a special word for interactivity in the same way that we don’t (yet) need a special word for people with only one head.”

mass media could well be a 20th century abberation


bi-directionality

HTTP://WWW.FLICKR.COM/PHOTOS/--STROMBERG--/

The root cause of the disruption is bi-directionality

People are themselves creating, curating, linking, sharing and it has profound implications for centrally controlled mass media


HTTP://WWW.FLICKR.COM/PHOTOS/BABYCREATIVE/

be part of disruption

There are three ways of reacting to this sort of disruption,

one is to ignore it, another to try and control it, the third is to embrace it and to try and find ways to enable it or be a part of it

that’s the route we’re going down


mutualisation

This word is core to a lot of our thinking on how to “be” as a relevant 21st century newspaper or news organisation.

Alan Rushbridger, our editor, talks a lot about the “mutualised newspaper” from my title


We’re fortunate to have cartoonists at The Guardian who can illustrate points so clearly

Andrzej Krauze has described Alan’s vision of a 20th century newspaper in this cartoon with the journalists within the solid walls of the newspaper throwing out content to the audience, hitting some


and has also drawn what we think newspapers should be more like, where there is “reach throughable space” between reader and journalism.

Alan talks a lot about lowering walls between journalists and readers


Mutualism is an anarchist school of thought which can be traced to the writings of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, who envisioned a society where each person might possess a means of production, either individually or collectively, with trade representing equivalent amounts of labor in the free market.

HTTP://EN.WIKIPEDIA.ORG/WIKI/MUTUALISM_(ECONOMIC_THEORY)

there are many definitions of mutual, mutuality and mutualism, many of which concern building societies, but this is my personal favourite from Wikipedia

“anarchist” the right feel for the internet and

“a society where each person might possess a means of production, either individually or collectively” sounds a lot like Web2.0 to me so I think we’re on the right track with mutual



so let’s deconstruct these four industrial actions in this new mutual future and see what we’re doing to each of them


co-creationfabricationdistributionmonetisation

clearly creation should be co-creation and I’ve got a great example of it to show


g20

It’s the G20 protests and their rather tragic outcome

The G20 was one of the most photographed events in history, certainly in the density of cameras


from the professional photographers


to the cameras from within the protestors


to bystanders who are photobloggers like Roo Reynolds from the BBC who was “kettled” when he went to see what was going on between meetings


The story obviously took a sad turn with the death of Ian Tomlinson which one of our journalists Paul Lewis felt was both tragic and suspicious.

He felt strongly that the official version of events didn’t quite match.


and through Twitter and his news pieces started to ask for any photos and footage about the event


which lead to this now famous piece of video camera phone footage emerging and being presented on our site

this story needed involvement from a partnership between journalists and an active readership to emerge


co-creationco-fabricationdistributionmonetisation

the next thing to mutualize is clearly fabrication and actually we think it goes hand in hand with


co-creationco-fabricationco-distributionmonetisation

distribution and we think the only way to really do this part is to open up and open out to developers


and that’s why in March we launched The Open Platform is our thinking and efforts to make it possible for developers to build applications with The Guardian, there are currently two parts to this strategy with more emerging early next year to add to our ecosystem


Content APIDataStore

the Content API, which contains XML, JSON and ATOM representations of all The Guardian articles we have rights for dating back to 1991, approximately 1 million articles for you to make applications out of



DataStore beautifully curated datasets to use in applications and visualisations. there is obviously a lot of data freely available on the internet, but some of it may be of unknown provenance. The Data Store is our response to that, just as the newspaper is curated news.


Weaving The Guardian into the fabric of the internet.

Matt McAlister

HTTP://WWW.FLICKR.COM/PHOTOS/PIGSAW/

Matt McAlister, head of the project set out this premise for the Open Platform at the launch


“into not on, cool”

Gavin Bell

HTTP://WWW.FLICKR.COM/PHOTOS/PSD/

Gavin Bell from Nature was sitting next to me and said “into not on, cool” and this is such a key and important distinction.

It relates totally to the mutuality of the interaction, if we were simply standing on the shoulders of others we would have less relevance to the internet over a longer trajectory than we can generate where Guardian articles, data and code are avaialble for developers to build on and build with.


I’m not bowled over much these days. But Guardian Open Platform is a chasmic leap into the future. It is a work of simplistic beauty that I’m sure will have a dramatic impact in the news market. The Guardian is already a market leader in the online space but Open Platform is revolutionary. It makes all of their major competitors look timid.

Governments should be doing this. Governments will be doing it. The question is how long will it take us to catch up.

Tom Watson MP

HTTP://WWW.FLICKR.COM/PHOTOS/JAMIN2/

This quote from Tom Watson MP was also a memorable one from our day of launch. For those of you who don’t know Tom he is basically the first minister of geek and is dearly missed since he left the cabinet earlier in the year.

I’m not bowled over much these days. But Guardian Open Platform is a chasmic leap into the future. It is a work of simplistic beauty that I’m sure will have a dramatic impact in the news market. The Guardian is already a market leader in the online space but Open Platform is revolutionary. It makes all of their major competitors look timid.

Governments should be doing this. Governments will be doing it. The question is how long will it take us to catch up.

Tom Watson MP


data.hmg.gov.uk

uk-government-data-developerson Google Groups

over 1000 datasetsfor developers to code a bettercountry

Well that day came yesterday and the answer is about 6 months from our launch in March.

I encourage you to sign up to uk-government-data-developers on Google Groups.

They’re in a preview phase at the moment and they want your help to make the service better.

There are over 1000 datasets there, several of them as full RDFa linked data.

They’re doing it for the same reasons we are, wonderful and unexpected things happen when you open up. No matter how many amazingly smart people you can amass within your building, statistically there will always be more on the outside.



So what have people been making


HTTP://WWW.SCULPTURE.ORG.UK/

so let’s have a quick look at some of those applications and you can see immediately what we mean about co-distribution

this is one of the applications from our launch. this is a small art foundation in Sussex which has always tried to punch above its weight online

in fact this is the artist page for Antony Gormley whose work is currently gracing the plinth in Trafalgar Square.

they’ve wanted to have news on their site for many years, but news is hard to do well. it was added to their site in about 3 hours

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Antony Gormley

Antony Gormley was born in London in 1950. Afterschooling at Ampleforth College, Yorkshire, he went onto complete a degree in Archaeology, Anthropology andHistory of Art at Trinity College, Cambridge, between theyears of 1968-71. Following his graduation, Gormleytravelled to India and Sri Lanka to study Buddhism forthree years. On his return to London, in 1974, heattended Central School of Art and Goldsmith's Collegebefore completing a postgraduate course in sculpture atSlade School of Art between 1977 and 1979.

Gormley's work has revivified the way in which thehuman form is appropriated. Frequently using his own body as the subject of hiswork, Gormley's innovative use of the body, as a vessel for memory andtransformation, explores the collective body and the relationship between self andother. His investigation into the human condition has been realised in highlyacclaimed large-scale installations such as Critical Mass (1995), Allotment (1997),Inside Australia (2002), Domain Field (2003), Another Place (2005), and his mostrecent exhibition, Blind Light (2007).

Celebrated internationally, Gormley has had solo and group exhibitions in Europe,Scandinavia, America, Japan and Australia. His sculptures have been acquired bymany public and private collections around the world. In 1994 he was awarded theTurner Prize and in 1999 he won the South Bank Prize for Visual Art. In 1997Gormley was made an Order of the British Empire (OBE) for his services tosculpture and in 2003 he became a Royal Academician. In 2007 he was awardedthe Bernhard Heiliger Award for Sculpture. He continues to fulfil his roles as anHonorary Fellow at the Royal Institute of British Architects; Trinity College,Cambridge and Jesus College, Cambridge, and his trustee positions at the BritishMuseum and Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art.

Photograph by Lars Gundersen

More Resources on Antony Gormley

www.antonygormley.comWikipedia entry for Antony Gormley

Recent News Mentioning Antony Gormley

Plinth consortspublished 9 days ago

I've got my hour on the plinth, but what should I do up there?The first winners of the draw to spend an hour as sculptor Antony Gormley'sfourth statue in Trafalgar Square have been revealed. Our arts correspondentVanessa Thorpe is among thempublished 9 days ago

Antony Gormley's coastline, Crosby, Merseyside: Walk ID 256published 17 days ago

Set in stone'Somebody will be exhibiting a bunch of bananas in a gallery, and they'll getme on the radio to talk dirty about it'published 17 days ago

How these men will honour the 7 July dead in this royal corner of LondonDesigning a memorial to the 7 July bomb victims was never going to be easy,but Kevin Carmody and Andrew Groarke's Hyde Park project is a fine balanceof simplicity and powerpublished 23 days ago

Kurt Schwitters, the great dadaist of CumbriaKurt Schwitters, a star of the dada movement, wanted to turn this barn into'the ultimate artwork'. Now Damien Hirst is campaigning to get it restored. ByPhilip Oltermannpublished 1 month, 26 days ago

Antony Gormley invites applicants to stand on Trafalgar Square's fourth plinthpublished 2 months, 2 days ago

Life as monumental artAntony Gormley is inviting 2,400 people to stand on the fourth plinth inTrafalgar Square for an hour – what would you do?published 2 months, 2 days ago

Different class, the pair of themThe relationship between pop stars and artists can be famously intense. Sowhat, asks Miranda Sawyer, can they take from each other?published 2 months, 4 days ago

Every picture tells a storyEight pop stars reveal the art that has most inspired them, from 60s legendsand surrealist dolls to outrageous manga sculpturepublished 2 months, 4 days ago

show 10 more

more information about this artist

other works from this artist

Bollards (Oval, Snowman,Peg, Penis)2001

publications from the CassSculpture Foundation

A Vision for Twenty-FirstCentury Sculpture

Sculpture at Goodwood |British ContemporarySculpture 02/03

publications from amazon.co.uk

Anthony Gormley

Inside Australia

Making an Angel

commissioning

since its establishment in 1992,the charity has annuallycommissioned 20 exemplarymonumental sculptures fromemerging and establishedcontemporary sculptors.

lending

our resource of 80 monumentalsculptures are now available onshort and long term loan for amonthly fee.

selling

all of the sculptures on thefoundation's grounds are availablefor sale, profits from these salesare split equally between the artistand the foundation, and directlyenable future commissions.

More Information

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Antony Gormley

Antony Gormley was born in London in 1950. Afterschooling at Ampleforth College, Yorkshire, he went onto complete a degree in Archaeology, Anthropology andHistory of Art at Trinity College, Cambridge, between theyears of 1968-71. Following his graduation, Gormleytravelled to India and Sri Lanka to study Buddhism forthree years. On his return to London, in 1974, heattended Central School of Art and Goldsmith's Collegebefore completing a postgraduate course in sculpture atSlade School of Art between 1977 and 1979.

Gormley's work has revivified the way in which thehuman form is appropriated. Frequently using his own body as the subject of hiswork, Gormley's innovative use of the body, as a vessel for memory andtransformation, explores the collective body and the relationship between self andother. His investigation into the human condition has been realised in highlyacclaimed large-scale installations such as Critical Mass (1995), Allotment (1997),Inside Australia (2002), Domain Field (2003), Another Place (2005), and his mostrecent exhibition, Blind Light (2007).

Celebrated internationally, Gormley has had solo and group exhibitions in Europe,Scandinavia, America, Japan and Australia. His sculptures have been acquired bymany public and private collections around the world. In 1994 he was awarded theTurner Prize and in 1999 he won the South Bank Prize for Visual Art. In 1997Gormley was made an Order of the British Empire (OBE) for his services tosculpture and in 2003 he became a Royal Academician. In 2007 he was awardedthe Bernhard Heiliger Award for Sculpture. He continues to fulfil his roles as anHonorary Fellow at the Royal Institute of British Architects; Trinity College,Cambridge and Jesus College, Cambridge, and his trustee positions at the BritishMuseum and Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art.

Photograph by Lars Gundersen

More Resources on Antony Gormley

www.antonygormley.comWikipedia entry for Antony Gormley

Recent News Mentioning Antony Gormley

Plinth consortspublished 9 days ago

I've got my hour on the plinth, but what should I do up there?The first winners of the draw to spend an hour as sculptor Antony Gormley'sfourth statue in Trafalgar Square have been revealed. Our arts correspondentVanessa Thorpe is among thempublished 9 days ago

Antony Gormley's coastline, Crosby, Merseyside: Walk ID 256published 17 days ago

Set in stone'Somebody will be exhibiting a bunch of bananas in a gallery, and they'll getme on the radio to talk dirty about it'published 17 days ago

How these men will honour the 7 July dead in this royal corner of LondonDesigning a memorial to the 7 July bomb victims was never going to be easy,but Kevin Carmody and Andrew Groarke's Hyde Park project is a fine balanceof simplicity and powerpublished 23 days ago

Kurt Schwitters, the great dadaist of CumbriaKurt Schwitters, a star of the dada movement, wanted to turn this barn into'the ultimate artwork'. Now Damien Hirst is campaigning to get it restored. ByPhilip Oltermannpublished 1 month, 26 days ago

Antony Gormley invites applicants to stand on Trafalgar Square's fourth plinthpublished 2 months, 2 days ago

Life as monumental artAntony Gormley is inviting 2,400 people to stand on the fourth plinth inTrafalgar Square for an hour – what would you do?published 2 months, 2 days ago

Different class, the pair of themThe relationship between pop stars and artists can be famously intense. Sowhat, asks Miranda Sawyer, can they take from each other?published 2 months, 4 days ago

Every picture tells a storyEight pop stars reveal the art that has most inspired them, from 60s legendsand surrealist dolls to outrageous manga sculpturepublished 2 months, 4 days ago

show 10 more

more information about this artist

other works from this artist

Bollards (Oval, Snowman,Peg, Penis)2001

publications from the CassSculpture Foundation

A Vision for Twenty-FirstCentury Sculpture

Sculpture at Goodwood |British ContemporarySculpture 02/03

publications from amazon.co.uk

Anthony Gormley

Inside Australia

Making an Angel

commissioning

since its establishment in 1992,the charity has annuallycommissioned 20 exemplarymonumental sculptures fromemerging and establishedcontemporary sculptors.

lending

our resource of 80 monumentalsculptures are now available onshort and long term loan for amonthly fee.

selling

all of the sculptures on thefoundation's grounds are availablefor sale, profits from these salesare split equally between the artistand the foundation, and directlyenable future commissions.

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ANTHONY ABRAHAMSIVOR ABRAHAMSJANE ACKROYDEDWARD ALLINGTONDAVID ANNESLEYKENNETH ARMITAGEJOHN ATKINNICK BARBERTONOLIVER BARRATTBEN BARRELLGLENYS BARTONZADOK BEN-DAVIDRODNEY BENDERMATHIAS BENGTSSONHAMISH BLACKIVAN BLACKHELAINE BLUMENFELDMATT BODIMEADEWILLARD BOEPPLEKEITH BROWNRALPH BROWNSANDY BROWNJON BUCKPETER BURKEANDREW BURTONSAM BUXTONTESSA CAMPBELL FRASERANTHONY CAROLYNN CHADWICKMICHAEL CHALLENGERANN CHRISTOPHERROBIN CONNELLYTERRENCE COVENTRYSTEPHEN COXTONY CRAGGBILL CULBERTBETH CULLENMAGGIE CULLENEUAN CUNNINGHAMGEORGE CUTTSGRENVILLE DAVEYJOHN DAVIESIAN DAWSONPAUL DAYRICHARD DEACONPIERRE DIAMANTOPOULOSTEVE DILWORTHCRAIG DOWNIEEVA DREWETTEDWARD DUTKIEWICZIAIN EDWARDSNIGEL ELLISGARTH EVANSABIGAIL FALLISIAN HAMILTON FINLAYROSE FINN-KELCEYMARK FIRTHLAURA FORDSUE FREEBOROUGHELISABETH FRINKWILLIAM FURLONGSTEVE GELIOTBRUCE GERNANDJOHN GIBBONSANDY GOLDSWORTHYANTONY GORMLEYLEE GRANDJEANJOHN GREEDSTEVEN GREGORYMARTIN GRIFFITHSCHARLES HADCOCKNIGEL HALLRICHARD HARRISTIM HARRISSONALEX HARTLEYDAVID HARVEYJASON HARVEYTHOMAS HEATHERWICKSEAN HENRYNICOLA HICKSPETER HIDESIMON HITCHENSSHIRAZEH HOUSHIARYANDERSON INGEJON ISHERWOODALLEN JONESANISH KAPOORMICHAEL KENNYMICHAEL KIDNERMANFRED KIELNHOFERDAVID KINGPHILLIP KINGBRYAN KNEALEDANNY LANELANGLANDS AND BELLWILLIAM LASDUNLAYTON AND MOSSBILLY LEELILIANE LIJNKIM LIMPETER LOGANELEANOR LONGRICHARD LONGJEFF LOWEJONATHAN LOXLEYMICHAEL LYONSDAVID MACHALASTAIR MACKIEDIANE MACLEANJOHN MAINEJOANNA MALLIN-DAVIESVERONIQUE MARIAMARTIN AND DOWLINGBARRY MASONSALLY MATTHEWSCHARLOTTE MAYERJULIAN MAYORBRIDGET MCCRUMBERNARD MEADOWSJACK MILROYDHRUVA MISTRYCATHY DE MONCHAUXTIM MORGANKEIKO MUKAIDETATYANA MURRAYDAVID NASHWILL NASHPAUL NEAGUSIMEON NELSONPETER NEWMANALASTAIR NOBLEEILÍS O'CONNELLTHOMAS OSTENBERGANA MARIA PACHECOJAMES PAGETZORA PALOVAEDUARDO PAOLOZZIJIM PARTRIDGETRUPTI PATELVONG PHAOPHANITTOM PHILLIPSROLAND PICHEDAVID PRATTWILLIAM PYESTEPHANIE QUAYLEMARC QUINNWENDY RAMSHAWVICTORIA RANCEKEITH RANDPETER RANDALL-PAGEKOBUS RETIEFCOLIN ROSECAROLINE ROTHWELLRUTTER AND BENNETTSOPHIE RYDERANDREW SABINMICHAEL SANDLELUCIEN SIMONRICHARD SLEESOPHIE SMALLHORNWELLS SMALLKEIR SMITHKIKI SMITHSARAH STATONJILLY SUTTONMARIALUISA TADEIWENDY TAYLORALMUTH TEBBENHOFFRICHARD TRUPPKAORU TSUNODAWILLIAM TUCKERGAVIN TURKWILLIAM TURNBULLJIM UNSWORTHPAUL VANSTONEMARCUS VERGETTESHEILA VOLLMERJOHANNES VON STUMMANDRE WALLACEROB WARDALEX WELCHRICHARD WENTWORTHDOUGLAS WHITEGILLIAN WHITERACHEL WHITEREADALISON WILDINGJULIAN WILDGLYNN WILLIAMSAVRIL WILSONCONOR WILSONRICHARD WILSONBILL WOODROWDAVID WORTHINGTON

Find a Random Artist


HTTP://WWW.SCULPTURE.ORG.UK/

so now they have news from The Guardian, their content is enriched, and The Guardian gets reach and new audiences, these guys have a large following in the USA and Japan who are now exposed to our content

we think empowering niche markets which are very monetisable is a key way for the Open Platform to be used


HTTP://WWW.MYECODNA.COM

This is a really great integration from MyEcoDNA who are building practical tailored guides for what you can do to reduce your environmental impact and they’re enhancing their content with content from The Guardian.


HTTP://WWW.GUARDIAN.CO.UK/GREEN-AD-NETWORK

We also have a green ad network which focusses on sustainability and ethical leadership. The two become a strong and mutual fit with co-monetisation opportunities.

Content and accompanying ad networks is a powerful combination for niches like the environment


Another great and topical integration involves these two gentlemen, the one on the right is Alberto Nardelli who runs Tweetminster


Tweetminster is a service which collates the messages of MPs, Parliamentary Candidates and official sources into a real-time newswire


and they can then use the dataset for time-series analytics, showing the trending of keywords, which can in turn be annotated with content from The Guardian showing what the news stories were at that time. Clearly here it was other people having expenses scrutinised.

These are just a couple of sample applications and today we’re rolling live a way you can browse them and see what’s being made and also be inspired to join in yourselves


Today we’ve just launched an App Gallery as a showcase for everything being built with the Open Platform, using the Content API and the second part of the offering, the Data Store



DataStore beautifully curated datasets to use in applications and visualisations


One great example is this dataset which powers the visualisation of UK government spending. Until yesterday this was a totally unique dataset, so much so that Number 10 requested a copy of this image.


And behind each of this form of infographic there is data, and often more data than in the infographic. The DataBlog and DataStore are our way of surfacing and disseminating this data.


And within each datablog entry there is a link to the data


Each entry has a link to a Google Spreadsheet for the data for you to use and visualise and people like Tony Hirst have been showing us how to do amazing things with Google Spreadsheet. There is often more data in here than in the infographic


as David McCandless has playfully done here where he’s taken our data on Illegal Drug use, combined it with data on happiness index rating from another source to show the overlaps, althought as he says “Just for fun, correlation is not cause”


and there is a lovely flickr community building around visualisations of DataStore data


and we try to add in topical datasets such as these ones about Gordon Brown’s and Peter Mandelson’s speeches as the Labour Party Conference


and the data on word counts is there for you to make things


co-creationco-fabricationco-distributionmonetisation

needs to be a whole stack, not just software, not just creation, everything needs to be mutual...


co-creationco-fabricationco-distributionco-monetisation

we think we know what it mutual monetisation looks like


these are the top 25 ad networks in the US, they’re huge

even the lesser known ones are enormous. as one part of our monetisation strategy we’re working with some of our partners who are taking full text content for them to take adverts accompanying that content and sharing in the revenue.

there are of course other monetisation strategies possible and some which will be thought up by our partners with whom we’re crowdsourcing new business models


co-creationco-fabricationco-distributionco-monetisation

We’re interested in co-fabrication internally as well as what other people can do with our APIs. We’re interested in how we can use toolkits, APIs and cloud solutions to help us when we need to build things. And we aim to give back through open sourcing where we can.


You can now build working software in less time than it takes to have the meeting to describe it.

Simon Willison

HTTP://WWW.FLICKR.COM/PHOTOS/PDCAWLEY/

The other comment I remember clearly from our launch day is this one from Simon Willison.


HTTP://WWW.FLICKR.COM/PHOTOS/DRDUL/

not all thingshave equal speeds

But I don’t think Simon is misunderstanding the problems of engineering vast pieces of software which have to scale... not at all, its just that as all software development has it’s own velocity, sometimes pieces of software need a long gestation period sometimes a short one

It also relates totally to scale as well, scaling is something which is very commonly on our minds at The Guardian


OlympicsWorld CupWimbledon9/117/7G20 ElectionsBudgetGlastonburyEdinburgh Festival

Some events happen which have drammatic effects on us as a newspaper



Sporting events





World events we have no warning of







some have a periodicity and we can plan for them





and some are cultural



they all share similar patterns though



High load

there are some events where we need to handle high load



High interactivity

interestingly these are also often high interactivity



Temporary(but need archiving)

they’re also often temporary


Social


social sharing is becoming a huge factor in this as well, it’s mutual distribution, earlier Cat from Facebook talked about some of our experimetation with Facebook Connect

social apps are also important and have impact on scalability as they reduce cacheability


Traditionally this would be solved by:

Adding featuresto platformBuying many more servers to cope with peak loadComplex caching layers

there are ways people have always tried to deal with this, this adds unnecessary code to support within the codebase and ties the schedule to external events




this is wasteful, both fiscally and for the environment




and this is often just very complicated to do


HTTP://WWW.FLICKR.COM/PHOTOS/MIKEBAIRD/

picking the right tool for the right job

content management systems have a lot in common with container ships. they do one thing very very well, they scalably hold and deliver specific things, and specific size and shape things, reliably, reproducibly, securely

however, they’re not designed to be nimble and carry small odd shaped parcels which are very timely, for that you need


HTTP://WWW.FLICKR.COM/PHOTOS/ROBWALLACE/

picking the right tool for the right job

a speedboat, what you actually need is many different types of vessels

What I’m definitely not saying is that CMS’s are wrong, it’s just that for specific tasks they may not be entirely the right thing.


what you really need is a spread of things, this is why International Rescue is so successful, it has a variety of tools large and small to do a variety of jobs, yet most publishing systems are either completely fixed on doing one thing in particular or are kludged to do many things not so well



Much of our thinking as well has to do with the speed you sometimes have to do things and how long these systems are used for. Sporting events have a reasonable lead time and so the large scale systems for them can be built over the same process length that you would build a CMS, other things have a short lead time and a high missed-opportunity cost.














sometimesyou haveto exceedthe speed limit

sometimes opportunities arise which mean that you have to react quickly and in a nimble or agile way and you know that what you make will have a high impact but a short lifespan but the missed opportunity cost is huge


MP’s expenses

and one of those is of course MP’s expenses


where a large collection of redacted documents were made available, about 450,000 of them.

this is a huge number of documents and a huge number of line items within them, if we were to try and analyse them we’d need help


which is what we got. Simon wrote a piece of software which allowed us and our readers to “crowdsource” a large proportion of the data. It’s an endeavour which is still ongoing





Timeline

11th June: proof of concept

15th June: go ahead in principle

16th June: designer gets involved

17th June: sysadmin added

18th June: launched and then performance tuned

what is fascinating about this for me is the velocity with which this was done. It is one of the first examples of our strategy of


first things first, how to pull apart awful PDFs, ended up being Photoshop and AppleScript


How was this built?

Django Framework

1 developer/1 week1 designer/2 days1 sysadmin/1 day

Amazon EC2/(cost £50)

Deployed 1 week after work started

HTTP://WWW.NIEMANLAB.ORG/2009/06/FOUR-CROWDSOURCING-LESSONS-FROM-THE-GUARDIANS-SPECTACULAR-EXPENSES-SCANDAL-EXPERIMENT/

what is fascinating about this for me is the velocity with which this was done. It is one of the first examples of our strategy of moving fast where the missed opportunity cost is very high


HTTP://WWW.FLICKR.COM/PHOTOS/PDCAWLEY/

“The Guardian has lead time of several weeks to get new hardware bought,” Willison said. “The project was only approved to go ahead less than a week before it launched.”


so as well as the cost element the speed element comes out again, we’re actually pretty quick at deploying hardware, but when you’re being reactive to a news story in an interactive and dynamic way, immediate is how quick you have to be.


How was this built?

Django Framework


Amazon EC2/S3(cost £50)



so we used EC2 and S3 and learnt a lot about it and also didn’t spend a huge amount to host it


How was this built?

Django Framework


Amazon EC2/S3(cost £50)



for a sophisticated piece of software which has built into it a social game, a data store, 450,000 images, an API onto the data and making it match the house style this seems pretty unheard of in many ways but it’s proving to be an interesting lead case


HTTP://WWW.FLICKR.COM/PHOTOS/NIHONBUNKA/

nothinglasts for ever

remake remodel

some bits of functionality aren’t meant to last forever, but need to handle high temporary activity and load, and you may want to deploy them again and again for different uses


Collecting conversations

this is something I’ve been working on of late, we’re really interested in Twitter, not just as social distribution, but as a mechanism that lowers the wall again between journalists and readers


collectingconversations

and it’s important that the conversations we collect are from the authentic accounts of the journalists and sit within the publicly used hashtag streams

the solution we came up with was to create a simple app which contained a whitelist of who could tweet on which subject

very simple app, we had a list of journalists, the tags which they could append to their messages on Twitter and a cache for the twitter messages so we were only having to do the hard work of polling and parsing once and so we’d stay within the Twitter API limits

the hackday version of the app took about 5 hours in total including analysing how best to get clean reproducible data out of the various Twitter APIs and we then spent about half a day adding features and deploying it for Edinburgh

Because it caches content, apart from errors in polling the Twitter API it sailed through a day long Twitter outage without showing errors to the public when all our other Twitter feed boxes showed nothing

It uses the task queue on AppEngine to smooth out the load of interrogating a lot of streams of journalists


It was always designed with extensibility in mind... there are other uses planned, but first of all it’s currently Party conference season. So it’s now seen use at the Liberal Democrat conference


and the Labour conference this week where actually it got a reasonable amount of load


How was this built?

Django FrameworkGoogle AppEngineTwitter API

1 developer/2 days1 designer/0.5 days

Cost of AppEngine £0

Needs maintainence time allowance

on really key thing is the last point here.

writing code now is simple and easy, maintaining it is relatively simple, but the moment something is out there people want it supported and to be extended.

also occasionally third parties go down or change their APIs so you need to plan in support and this approach needs to be melded into the schedule never sit totally outside of it


where next?

HTTP://WWW.FLICKR.COM/PHOTOS/MICHAELPATRICK/

We’re on a journey at the moment, we first showed close friends and partners our API just a year ago and we launched it in March.

Much of what we’re doing is thinking and travelling with those partners and friends along new paths which none of us had maybe thought of or considered before.

Today we showed the App Gallery and in Q1 next year we’ll be launching some more important parts of our ecosystem and our initiative which we believe strengthen the commercial and the integration elements of the ecosystem.


The significant thing is to think about The Guardian as a platform, and not just a publisher.

Mike Bracken

HTTP://WWW.FLICKR.COM/PHOTOS/PAULCARVILL/

This is as close to a daily mantra and a mission statement as we can come.

We owe a lot of the thinking here to this man, Mike Bracken our Director of Technology who I’m proud to work for on this project

When the project started this was an opening gambit, I think although we’re only six months into the public facing part of the project I think it’s more appropriate for it to be how we close, our ambitions are summed up in this phrase really and the strategy that Mike has masterminded is already beginning to bear fruit in the efforts developers are making with our APIs and with the quick build and deploy solutions like Simon’s MPs Expenses app.


what would you do?

Since we’re being mutual, actually I think this is the only fair way to end...

What would you do...

but I’m happy to answer questions


Thank you

Chris [email protected]: @jaggeree

http://www.guardian.co.uk/open-platform

Twitter: openplatform

Date post:	09-May-2015
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