NPR Everywhere: Even better APIs and Content Strategies

A follow up to the NPR Everywhere presentation at Web 2.0 NY 2010. This presentation explores the emerging best practices in API design and product implementation with concrete example from NPR, the media leader who first brought a public content API to the market in 2008. NPR continues to innovate and learn about what it means to have flexible content. Our philosophy assumes that to maintain relevancy in an online world media companies need to be adroit at delivering content to multiple channels and disparate platforms. This in turn has led us to keep a strategic focus on our API development. This positions us not just to meet our distribution needs, but has also helped drive business opportunity and allows for effective design and user experience whether in a browser or on a mobile device.

This presentation will share our lessons learned and key metrics around successful creation and use of flexible content – from technology needs to business, editorial and design opportunities in an increasingly fragmented online product landscape. In the past year we have completed a major refactoring of the code in our API. As ever increasing demand of the API validates our overall approach, we needed to make changes to the underlying code to support ever growing traffic. These changes have resulted in a 22% increase in performance and a much more maintainable code base. This session will examine the flaws with the original design, and explore the latest changes and forthcoming improvements to NPR’s suite of APIs.

Ensuring good architecture of systems and flexibility of content has also allowed NPR to have the freedom and agility to quickly deploy solid user experience and elegant design to multiple platforms. From the Peabody award winning website, to rapid development on various mobile products, this approach has required changes and created new opportunities for editorial, design and product processes. We’ll further explore how content, technology and design intersect and what has worked in NPR’s content and platform initiatives.