I've just been impressed with what the Times has been doing with the web recently. They seem to get it. So many newspapers are going the way of the Auk, it's nice to see the Times start to offer some compelling offerings to developers.
Newspapers have an immense amount of long tail content, but most of them don't have a clue that their old content is valuable. I'm excited to see that the Times is starting offer API's to let developers play with some of that long tail content.
They index news sources including blogs and newspapers and other sites. You can refine the sources by the sourceIDs and hence select only newspapers for your API results.
That's exactly what I was thinking... Since it's all GET, a properly implemented RSS/Atom feed could go a long way towards a newspaper API, and might even be a better solution in some ways - no extra code to develop/maintain, no API key requirement, little need for documentation etc.
I work for Daylife and any newspaper or blogger can have an API for their own content using our API platform, as long as they are in our index (http://developer.daylife.com). The API interface is scalable, very malleable and flexible to use letting you ask almost 400+ questions through the interface.
If you click your back button when you're on the documentation page (not the loading page), you'll send yourself into an infinite loop with their login system. Heh.
Compared to the blundering idiocy that's rampant in the traditional media -- including attempting to sue people for linking to their stories! -- the NYTimes crew are operating at genius-level. It's really refreshing to see someone get it, especially considering how vital print newsrooms are.
and you can't actually pull the reviews - only a snippet, and then link to them. and their whole api is crippled by a non commercial use clause. looks great on paper, but the NYT has been very timid in their implementation.
Newspapers have an immense amount of long tail content, but most of them don't have a clue that their old content is valuable. I'm excited to see that the Times is starting offer API's to let developers play with some of that long tail content.
The movie reviews API is really just a start. They also have a tags API, and they say that they're working on a search API on this page: http://developer.nytimes.com/docs/timestags_api