Nieman Foundation at Harvard
Building on our piece on the Reuters.com rethink, Source went back to get the nerdier details from Paul Smalera. Of note is that it’s all built on an API called Media Connect (see comment below) that generates the content feeds for all its new platforms and products:
The other thing this setup lets us do is show off the depth of Reuters content. We produce, including videos, text, pictures, and other content types, something like 20,000 unique items per day. But our current website really didn’t let us show off the depth of our reporting. So one of the main functions of the CMS is really set up to allow editors to create and curate collections — we call them streams — of stories. This lets us get to the endless-scroll type behavior that Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, and the rest have made popular as the new default behavior of the web.
One comment:
Hiya, Paul Smalera here. Tiny (easily made!) error in the summary. Media Connect is the name of the existing API that we feed to our other media customers. We have built a whole new API for the new Reuters.com (or set of, really) that does two main things:
1.consumes Media Connect and populates a data store for Reuters.com
2.powers Reuters.com and the other platforms (API, iOS) by serving JSON representations of the data that’s been pulled down and put into our store.
Thanks for picking up the post!
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