The New York Times web site provides a rich set of APIs, as described here: http://developer.nytimes.com/docs You’ll need to start by signing up for an API key. Your task is to choose one of the New York Times APIs, construct an interface in R to read in the JSON data, and transform it to an R dataframe.
options(stringsAsFactors = FALSE)
library(jsonlite)
library(httr)
library(DT)
url <- "https://api.nytimes.com/svc/books/v3/lists/best-sellers/history.json"
api.key <- "da96d464ccb8464aa68d08000fc49d8a"
url <- paste0(url, '?api-key=', api.key)
df <- jsonlite::fromJSON(url, flatten = TRUE)
datatable(df$results)