Rediscovering Newspaper Content

Saw a lot of people talking about this New York Times site today on Twitter which allows you to collate old articles in a Pintrest-esque style: http://nytimes.com/compendium.  Whilst I don’t love the execution of this particular site I really love the idea of socially discovering existing articles of your favourite newspaper.

Every weekend we subscribe to the print editions of both The Guardian and the The Observer, newspapers that have no paywall in place for their content online, and every weekend I find one or more articles that I worry will be lost forever once they disappear into the recycling.  As a hoarder it would be tempting to start collecting all of these papers so that one day I might refer back to them – but this just is not the smart way to be thinking.  What I truly want is a fully searchable index of all articles that can be socially curated by readers digging out stuff that they found interesting. These papers always have great imagery with each of their stories so there is no reason the resource could not be presented in a visually beautiful fashion.

Enter the Guardian API http://explorer.content.guardianapis.com/#/?format=json&order-by=newest

In a typically forward-thinking way they have opened up their content to the world – now we just need someone to design and build a beautiful looking discovery site on top of this.