It always bums me out that the cool kid startup APIs always get the lion's share of the attention when it comes to APIs in the tech news. Which I guess makes it my responsibility to show the ACTUAL cool kid APIs, like the Chronicling America API from The Library of Congress, which provides access to information about historic newspapers and select digitized newspaper pages.

The Library of Congress provides APIs for searching the newspaper directory and digitized page contents using OpenSearch, auto-suggesting of newspaper titles, links using a stable URL pattern, and JSON views of all newspaper resources. They also provide linked data allowing you to process and analyze newspaper information with "conceptual precision" (oooooh I like that), as well as bulk data for your deeper research needs.

I wish that ALL newspapers had APIs like the New York Times and The Guardian do, and information was available to the public by default, and that everything was automatically synced to any archive or collection that was interested in it, like the Libary of Congress. I know that newspapers are having a hard time in the digital age, and I can't help but feel that APIs would help them evolve, and shift until they find their voice in the digital age.