The first full day of the Web 2.0 Expo in SF opened with a great conversation about the benefits and potential improvements of the application programming interfaces (APIs) released by National Public Radio and Current in the past year. NPR’s Director and Chief of Technical Strategy Zach Brand explained the process of making 13 years of broadcast content available for sharing as a “brand and release” approach, while Current’s VP of Strategy Robin Sloan described his joy at the local cable and satellite network’s decision to make its video content available in a structured way.

Photo by Andy Carvin.

Full disclosure: as a former intern at the NPR affiliate station Chicago Public Radio (WBEZ) and a supporter of KQED, I’m a public broadcasting junkie. Outside news feeds in an RSS aggregator, I get most of my news from radio coverage online and can often be found streaming and listening through huge headphones at my desk. Programming from Public Radio International and American Public Media is a weekly must-listen, but for me, NPR’s breadth of reporting and analysis takes the cake.

So it was with much excitement that I went to hear Brand and Sloan explain the process of leading their media organizations’ efforts to make content accessible and shareable. NPR, which launched their open API last July, now makes 250,000 individual stories and the work of 16 public broadcasting partners available through it. And it hasn’t gone unnoticed: with 1,300 registrants, Brand says the API has increased exposure and reach to audiences who wouldn’t otherwise tune in live or visit NPR.org.

While some of NPR’s competitors have found Atom feeds to be the best distribution mechanism, the majority of the content creator’s API registrants get theirs in the form of XML, widgets, and RSS feeds. Beyond output formats, there is the additional question of how the content available on the API is shared with mobile users. After Public Radio Exchange created a radio tuner iPhone application, a part time programmer and firefighter who supports NPR’s efforts created a second, wildly popular app which listeners can browse and use to listen to stories broken down by category. While Sloan said he’s humbled by the fact that someone outside the organization beat NPR when it came to creating an iPhone app, it’s a testament to how much people are advocating to make its content more accessible anywhere.

Sloan said a similar accessibility was what his Current team strived for in partnering with Twitter to deliver real-time updates of debate watchers’ opinions during last fall’s presidential election. The opportunity that an Open API provides, Sloan said, is experimentation—instead of creating a static set of content, the nature of making multimedia shareable is that it can be located and changed. This can be seen in the difference between the one-to-many style election coverage presented in 2004 and the changing presentation of many-to-many coverage of late 2008. Sloan admitted that there was a learning curve in the quality of presentation and scale of distribution between the first debate and election night, but overall I like the idea of the trend away from overly edited, singular voice presentation, even it if means mistakes are made the first few times out of the gate.

While inherently different in their average audience age and funding mechanisms, NPR and Current have both begun to demonstrate the way that long unaltered methods for radio and video distribution are being given a less restricted life. Sloan told Web 2.0 participants to “be imaginative when thinking about who [their] API audiences might be.” Even more than the media companies, the ones who stand to gain the most from the implementation of API software are the people who weren’t formerly able to access all it has the potential to provide. And that’s news worth waking up for.