COPE: "No way we could have gotten that done without an API"

This edition of "¡APIcryphal!" retells the evolution and impact of the "Create Once, Publish Everywhere" (COPE) strategy, initially developed by Daniel Jacobson and his team at National Public Radio (NPR).

TL;DR: 

Separation of data from presentation creates the flexibility necessary to navigate a rapidly changing digital landscape.

Occasionally, moments emerge among the daily business-as-usual, changing the course of entire industries. The API landscape is a space as molded by legend as any other. While their accuracy to actual events remains debated, these tales remain the cornerstones of hallway tracks and executive talking points. These are API's apocryphal stories - the ¡APIcryphal!

Observance

Daniel Jacobson had a problem. As an engineering leader within National Public Radio (NPR), he was accustomed to budget constraints. But at the turn of the new millennium, his limited engineering investment was being called upon to serve more use cases.

Before voice assistants, before native apps, and even before the iPod, media companies publishing to the web were challenged to distribute their content in extensible ways. In 2002, NPR had a series of ways of creating what visitors would find on their website. Sometimes, pieces would be marked up with custom HTML. In other cases, radio stories would be saved to an SQL Server database and dynamically generated with a ColdFusion system. For slightly richer content, NPR used a Java-based system in tandem with an Informix database for syndication on local station pages. 

And everyone readily agreed that it was a mess. Supporting three different presentation layers with three different sets of infrastructure took considerable time and energy. NPR's strength was in the editorial content, not managing multiple disparate systems. 

At the time, NPR leadership sought a vendor solution to solve the problem, something akin to Interwoven or Vignette, the leading web publishing tools of the day. While these "professional" systems promised a single web publishing experience, it came at a steep price, one that an organization like NPR, funded by public donations, could ill afford. 

Furthermore, Jacobson feared that these systems were too fixated about rendering a singular type of experience: the web page. While NPR had been primarily concerned with distributing the audio for its popular shows, like Morning Edition, Jacobson could see a greater emphasis on full text and image accompaniments, and someday, even video. RSS 1.0, released in December 2000, was also an intriguing possibility. Looking ahead, he feared being unable to meet the growing demand for data flexibility. Jacobson described the situation in a 2012 ReadWrite interview, "-the flexibility, and the opportunity for thinking in these [new] kinds of ways, was somewhat limited." If a new output format was needed, it required a tremendous amount of additional effort. 

Jacobson's growing unease while performing due diligence coincided with the projects' sponsor leaving NPR. Sensing an opportunity, Jacobson set out to build the syndication architecture he felt was necessary before the replacement could be found. 

As Jacobson described in a 2013 Lullabot interview, "We hunkered down. And that's where we really started thinking about the philosophies."

Together, Jacobson and his team developed four core philosophies of their approach: 

• Build content management systems (CMS), not web publishing tools (WPT)
• Separate content from the display (or presentation layer)
• Ensure content modularity
• Ensure content portability

Together, these philosophies became known as the Create Once, Publish Everywhere (or COPE) strategy.

Again, from the ReadWrite interview: 

"That was the really fortunate decision that we made… We didn’t think about iPhones and tablets, and things like that, in 2002. But we were thinking that we could imagine a case somewhere down the road where the Web site would need to change again, or we’re going to do another redesign… It was really important for us to have this COPE model, so we can actually capture all the metadata that’s important to us in a very modularized way so that, regardless of what the display is going to look like, we can publish to it very easily. So conceptually, we separated the idea of capturing the data from presenting the data."

The CMS and metadata enrichment publishing approach was NPR’s first abstraction layer. But the CMS and database were still tightly coupled. In 2007, when NPR wanted to launch a cross-program site dedicated to music, there were problems. "It was a very different user interface, different presentation, different assets associated with each piece," says Jacobson.

Extending the CMS was an option, but what about the next custom experience? And the one after that?

"It was that moment in 2007, I think, when we said, we’ll need another abstraction layer to separate out the direct access from the presentation layer to the database, even though we had conceptualized them as being different, that binding to the database was still there. That’s when we created this new abstraction layer of the API, and shortly after that, [we realized] we could open this thing up quickly."

Two years later, in 2009, Daniel Jacobson collated much of his teams' COPE-acquired learnings in the first of a series of well-received and widely circulated ProgrammableWeb articles. 

Interpretation

While COPE was originally intended as a cost-effective strategy to manage demand for NPR's content, it quickly became an industry blueprint for how companies might serve a rapidly expanding set of experience expectations. From application mashups to responsive web design to smartphone native apps, the possible opportunities far outstriped the ability for continued CMS tweaks to meet them. While COPE hadn't started as an API strategy, when other service and experience opportunities necessitating an API presented themselves, NPR had the architecture and workflows to support it.  

By taking a principled approach to separating their data from the front-end presentation, NPR  could lend its content to an API. 

A 2009 Jacobson slidedeck example showing the same NPR Morning Edition story presented on the:

1. Official NPR web page
2. NPR.org Player
3. NPR News iPhone App
4. NPR Mobile Website
5. Boston NPR affiliate

It seems obvious now, but at the time the idea of creating content once and in a form that would allow it to be recontextualized everywhere it needed to be, without additional effort for each platform, was a profound concept. 

It led some industry pundits to declare that NPR was "doing everything right".

Keys

In late 2009, Apple's Steve Jobs called and invited NPR to participate in a first-of-its-kind hardware launch. The catch was that the team had three weeks. 

Despite the tight deadline, NPR was there with a native application when Jobs launched the iPad on January 27, 2010. In fact, the team also produced an app for the Safari Web browser in those three weeks. What seemed impossible at a surface level was possible due to different technologies leveraging the same API infrastructure. Having already developed the API, it was only a matter of spending a few weeks designing the user experience and coding the app.

"No way we could have gotten that done without an API," says Jacobson. 

The key benefits provided by the API included: 

Lowering Risk - As mentioned in the iPad example, the API gave NPR the ability to capitalize on new platforms in a relatively short time without updating the backend. Projects that would require a significant investment of time and resources, instead, become trivial and, subsequently, make it easier for the organization to say yes to a new product or strategic partner integration.

Driving Traffic - New products and strategic partners translate into more traffic. Jacobson cited that between 2009 and 2010 NPR’s traffic increased 100%. Eighty-five percent was due to the platform development by the API. And many of these API use cases would drive people back to the primary NPR presence. 

Increasing Brand Awareness - According to Sarah Lumbard, who was responsible for business development for NPR Digital during her time there from 2010 to 2014, the API made it easy to integrate NPR content into the entertainment and communications system that became known as Ford Sync. Because of the ease of integration, NPR enjoyed a prominent launch spot that otherwise may have gone to a larger or better-known media organization. 

Empowering Affiliates - Jacobson credits the API with substantially improving the relationship between the mother ship and the local stations. Without an API, if a member station wanted to feature content from NPR on its Web site, it had to take the content that NPR offered. With the API, it became much easier for a member station to create the representation that makes the most sense for their context. This flexibility encouraged the use of more NPR content on the member stations' websites.

Easing Recruiting - The success of COPE, combined with its positive reception, put NPR on the map as a technical organization. Jacobson stated that he believed the work positively impacted recruiting and raised NPR's visibility as a technical workplace.

Taken in its entirety, the COPE model has had a significant and lasting impact on how organizations think about and implement content strategy with APIs.

Reversal

While COPE's benefits were evident to many, some pointed out in 2009 that the flexible strategy may not be worth the cost for all publishers:

"Unless your business model depends on aggressively leveraging your content and you can afford to play on the cutting edge, a lighter weight 'website in a box' style architecture may give you the flexibility you need without the additional complexity and cost…" 

Clinton Forry, writing in 2012, articulated his problems with the COPE strategy. Mainly, he felt that the encouragement to publish everywhere ignored important rights issues on how the data might be used. 

"COPE makes the assumption that content (once produced, properly marked up, and made available via CMS or API) is suitable for any use. The everywhere in create once, publish everywhere is a marketing catastrophe waiting to happen."

Forry proposed his acronym, COPS: Create Once, Publish Selectively. Under Forry's proposal, content would still undergo the same metadata preparation steps as in COPE cases. What was different, however, is that COPS added editorial and messaging considerations unique to each audience. Furthermore, it would allow for content syndication only in cases where stated objectives and goals could be met. 

While the COPS acronym didn't catch on, at least not to the degree that COPE is remembered, many media organizations now practice a more selective approach to integrations and partnerships. Even NPR, who started with wanting to distribute everywhere and has a publicly accessible OAS3 description, no longer accepts new accounts from external users. 

Legacy

Daniel Jacobson left NPR in 2010. About the same time, he authored a book, APIs, A Strategy Guide. His career took him to subsequent high-profile positions at Netflix and the New York Times. During his time with Netflix Engineering, he popularized the concept of an API architecture he referred to as "experience layers". But that is a story for another time. 

The COPE strategy experienced a surge in popularity in the early part of the twenty-teens. As more people attempted to scale distribution to multiple experiences, NPR's success translated to numerous conference speaking invites and guest article posts. Jacobson was equally delighted and modest about his role in COPE's popularity. Again, from the Lullabot podcast interview: 

Host Jeff Eaton: So I guess coming back to that initial question, you know is it a little weird now to hear the stuff that you worked on turned into sort of the go to example slide in everyone's presentations about structured content and reuse?

Daniel Jacobson: Yeah, it still freaks me out. It's great. I love seeing it. I love talking to people about it. And you know if there's a way that I can help people you know, I love doing that.

The legacy of the COPE strategy extends beyond NPR, influencing how many organizations approach digital content creation and distribution. It has paved the way for more dynamic, scalable, and efficient content management systems that can serve the needs of a diverse and ever-changing digital ecosystem. By emphasizing the separation of content from presentation and leveraging APIs for wide distribution, COPE remains a reference point in the digital strategy of content-focused organizations worldwide.