Yesterday in my post about Radio National I tentatively suggested that a new media strategy for the national broadcaster might mean more than new delivery platforms. That it might mean a rethink of how the content is conceived and created.The point doesn’t only apply to the ABC, of course. The same is true of all Big Media.
Now, when people have said things like this to me in the past, I have ended up asking questions like: “Yes, but how would it be different? What exactly do you mean?”
Well, thanks to Elias Bizannes I have been alerted, rather late in the day, to an example: big media as a combination of platform and network. Not only digging up information, but also making it available for interrogation, use and even mash-up by others.
The example I am talking about is the move by the New York Times to launch an API based on campaign finance data to allow users to construct their own analyses based on candidate, zip code, whatever. The Times describes the project thus:
“With the Campaign Finance API, you can retrieve contribution and expenditure data based on United States Federal Election Commission filings. Campaign finance data is public and is therefore available from a variety of sources, but the developers of the Times API have distilled the data into aggregates that answer most campaign finance questions. Instead of poring over monthly filings or searching a disclosure database, you can use the Times Campaign Finance API to quickly retrieve totals for a particular candidate, see aggregates by ZIP code or state, or get details on a particular donor.
The Campaign Finance API is currently limited to presidential campaign data. Future versions will include house and senate campaign data.”
The Times says it plans more APIs, including ones based on congressional votes.
So what are the Australian applications? Well, the campaign finance documentation might not be it, given that the Australian Electoral Commission already has a pretty spivvy database.
But let’s say a media organisation with local and regional presence – such as the ABC or the Fairfax Media/ Rural Press conglomerate – provided the public with an interrogatable database on how their councillors have voted on every issue. Or on every development and developer operating in the area. Or on the detail of local government budgets, road funding by state government, expenditure on health, key health data such as life expectancy and disease rates by postcode – you get the idea.
Or perhaps something could be done with a combination of politicians’ registers of pecuniary interest, and company search data available through the Australian Securities and Investment Commission, plus data from Land Titles Offices.
Or for less weighty matters, look at the New York Times’ API based on Movie Reviews. Perhaps the ABC’s several book and movie related programs could do something like this?
Moving beyond journalism, might the day come when the archives of an organisation like the ABC are made available for others to use in creating new drama from pastiches of old? Would we want it, if so?
Other ideas, please!
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