There are many benefits to implementing standards for metadata: interoperability, efficiency, and transparency among them. A fair amount of NewsLynx’s code is dedicated to figuring out information that is already kept in a structured format in the CMS but is not machine-readable when viewing the published page. NewsLynx scrapes the headline, tries to discern an accurate publish date (which is surprisingly difficult), as well as information like one or many authors. As previously discussed, tagging articles is a difficult task and one that NewsLynx currently requires manual input despite the fact that many CMS’s already require articles be tagged at publication time, although often not systematically, as previously discussed.
If article pages included this information in a structured data format, third-party tools like NewsLynx could more easily leverage newsroom content. The analytics platform Parse.ly has started requiring its paying clients to implement the JSON for Linking Data standard (JSONLD),61common standard. This format is promising and for a low investment on the part of the newsroom, its inclusion could solve a range of problems involved with measurement and data standardization and lower the bar for building new tools to gain insights from an organization’s publishing habits.