The Guardian is opening up their news to everyone with Open Platform, with an open API. it’s free, you can do whatever you want with the news, reprint it, mash it up, whatever. However they will runs ads in it. This is a smart move.
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.
Will it work? It’s too early to tell, but it definitely beats going out of business, and Guardian is showing some guts by embracing new business models instead of clinging on to old, defunct ones.
This is how newspaper will survive. By inventing new ways to get the news out. And by realizing they are in the news business, not the newsprint business.