A significant move happened in the online publishing world this week and it is a sign of things to come for any online publishing company that is burning money managing their own hosting operations.

Newsweek.com announced this week that the site is outsourcing its Web site hosting duties to Amazon, joining a small but growing number of companies experimenting with cloud computing.

“Until now, Newsweek.com had been hosted by its parent company, The Washington Post Co. The media company has been trying to cut losses at its magazine division, which recorded $29.3 million in operating losses in 2009. By joining the cloud, Newsweek expects to save close to $500,000 annually.

“It saves Newsweek money,” said Geoff Reiss, vp, general manager, Newsweek Digital.

“Lots of people out there built their own infrastructure and are going to be tortured by this idea of sunk costs.”

Kontexto started using Amazon Web Services in early 2008 and now our whole real time content analytics platform is built on the Amazon cloud. We have always been lobbing the idea around of launching a cloud based news infrastructure that takes care of everything post publishing including storage, search, delivery and analytics. Give the CMS and editing freedom to the content creators, but hand off everything else.

After newsweek.com, it is hard to say who will be the next to transition hosting to the cloud. Some other certainly have without announcing it. But it is good to see a brand name publication make an organizational shift to the cloud.

Full jump to Mediaweek article

Interesting post today called The API Times by Jeff Jarvis of BuzzMachine that explores something near and dear to us at Kontexto…. news APIs, news APIs and more news APIs.

With the New York Times moving towards launching APIs and NPR offering APIs right now, you can certainly feel the movement of news organizations towards making their news data and other information accessible programmatically.

The current availability of news APIs sort of feels like RSS feed availability on news websites 5 years ago, limited or non-existent. But here we are today with RSS feeds on almost every news website not too mention countless blog rss feeds. I wonder if APIs will be as visible and common on news websites and blogs in the next 5 years? Kontexto is betting heavy on yes.

Here are the questions from The API Times post that I want to put front and center:

1. What if all news organizations had APIs?

2. What products, services, and companies could be cooked atop these APIs?

3. What data should be made available as APIs?

4. What could you do with the data?

5. How would this change news?

RSS feeds instigated a whole new micro economy of products and services for the creation, management, measurement and advertising of RSS feeds.

The same thing should happen from making news APIs common, open and available to everyone. Everyone (including us at Kontexto) involved with news should be asking the above 5 questions over and over and over. Thanks to BuzzMachine for putting them out there.