Jackie Calmes, Joan Shorenstein Fellow (Spring 2015) and national correspondent for The New York Times, introduces her new discussion paper examining the increasing influence of conservative media on the Republican Party's agenda. Calmes found that beyond the big names and outlets such as Limbaugh and Fox, smaller local personalities also exert significant influence over listeners and politicians. This influence is troubling to leaders in the Republican Party, who Calmes interviewed extensively for the paper. She argues that today's conservative media now shapes the agenda of the party, pushing it to the far right – at the expense of its ability to govern and pick presidential nominees.

David Weinberger, Joan Shorenstein Fellow (Spring 2015) and senior researcher at Harvard’s Berkman Center, introduces his newly-published discussion paper exploring the successes, challenges and opportunities for news organizations using APIs. An API (application programming interface) enables websites and applications to talk to each other and efficiently share data and functionality across sites and platforms. In this podcast, Weinberger provides both practical recommendations for creating open APIs and a vision for a future of online news where open APIs become commonplace – enabling a new era of interoperability and shareability across the Web.

William E. Buzenberg, Joan Shorenstein Fellow (Spring 2015) and former Executive Director of the Center for Public Integrity, introduces his newly-published discussion paper, "Anatomy of a Global Investigation: Collaborative, Data-Driven, Without Borders". Buzenberg's paper explores the need for and impact of international collaborations between news outlets. Buzenberg argues that although our world – and its resulting news stories – have become increasingly more globalized in nature, from finance to the environment to crime, most news outlets still find their scope restricted by nation-state borders and thinly-spread foreign correspondents.