The Guardian Experiments With a New Business Model

In an economic crisis, creative desctruction tends to feel, well, a bit more distructive. The writing has been on the wall for the newspaper models of yore for a while, but recently the struggling state of the industry has become even more dramatic, with folks speculating about the doom of the New York Times and Hearst publications pondering closing the Seattle Post-Intellegencer and the San Francisco Chronicle.

Not everyone is going down without a fight, however. Mashable wrote a story this morning about how the UK's Guardian is taking a radically different approach to content. Basically, they'll be opening up their information to make it easier to use, but turn users into advertising distributors.

They're building something called Open Platform:

It consists of two parts: the Content API, which lets you freely retrieve data from Guardian’s vast content database (over one million articles), and the Data Store, a collection of stats and data sets curated by Guardian journalists...

Therefore, instead of trying to charge you for content that can easily be duplicated ad infinitum, Guardian will let anyone duplicate and use their content and then slap ads on top of everything. Launch partners include The Cass Sculpture Foundation, which is using Open Platform to add Guardian articles about British artists to its site, as well as Stamen and OpenStreetMap, which developed a service that makes use of users geotagging Guardian articles, positioning articles, images and videos on a map.

I'm excited to see if this bears any fruit. I wonder if there are going to be enough app developers who want to use the newspaper's content for it to be viable. I would certainly like high quality newspapers to find a way to continue to sustain themselves. Either way, now is the time to experiment with new ways of selling value, and it's good to see a biggie like the Guardian going for it.