Society;|;DOI: 10.1145/1953122.1953129
All the news
That’s fit for you
Personalized news promises to make daily journalism
profitable again, but technical and cultural obstacles have slowed
the industry’s adoption of automated personalization.

IN 2006, a pair of entrepreneurs tarted a company called Out- brain with a promising prem- ise: sifting through the mas- sive volume of news available
online to find what’s most interesting
to each reader. As Outbrain CEO Yaron
Galai puts it, “You might have just read
something that was a waste of time,
and others feel the same way, so we
could get some collaborative filtering
going. From a reader’s perspective, it’s
very tempting to solve this problem.”
But a year into product development,
the Outbrain founders decided to
change course because of a factor they
hadn’t appreciated: the sheer velocity
of online news. “News goes away too
quickly,” says Galai, “and there’s not
enough time to collect deep-enough
data to see who likes what and how it
relates to other readers.”
Delivering personalized news poses
much harder problems than deliver-
ing personalized recommendations
of books and movies as Amazon and
Netflix do. Yet, despite the difficulties,
personalized news seems all the rage
these days. In February alone, The New
York Times, The Washington Post, and
Yahoo! all announced some form of
automatic personalization, and Google
is quietly running its own experiments
in personalized news delivery.

These companies, along with several startups, see the revenue potential of giving each user more of what he or she wants. “I don’t think it’s rocket science to say that people who read the product more frequently and more thoroughly are more likely to subscribe to it than those who do not,” says Marc Frons, the chief technology officer at The New York Times, which earlier this year started limiting the number of articles nonsubscribers can read for free.

Joshua Benton, who directs Har-

The New York Times and other media companies are implementing personalized news delivery.

vard University’s Nieman Journalism Lab (mission: “to help journalism figure out its future in an Internet age”), agrees that personalization offers enormous business potential. “The New York Times has well over a decade of data about what stories I’ve read, how many seconds I’ve spent on each story, and what sections I’ve read, so you would think they would be able to tailor my experience in a way that would be more pleasing to me,” Benton says. “As a result, the page becomes a more valuable piece of property to an advertiser.” Regardless of how the Times’ paywall pans out, more advertising revenue would be particularly welcome in an industry whose sharply declining print circulations have led to decreases in ad sales and, in many cases, the death of entire newspapers.

But despite the promise of algorithmic personalization, the idea is far

Marina;Krakovsky

 

simpler in theory than in practice, and newspapers have struggled to figure out how to do it without giving up their traditional role as arbiters of news.

“Computer scientists may think it’s nirvana to get what you want to get,” says Penelope Abernathy, professor of digital media economics at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “But a newsperson will say, ‘My role is to bring you the world, and it may be news you didn’t know you needed to know.’ ” Print journalists don’t usually view themselves as mere news retailers but as crucial players in democratic society—and news personalization threatens to erode that function. As in the bal-kanization of culture in general—from niche books and movies to ideologically focused television news channels— personalized news risks doing the opposite of what newspapers have traditionally done: Instead of uniting people through a common discourse, personalization may make readers ever more insular.

 

A hybrid Approach

The solution at The New York Times has been a hybrid approach. The site is supplementing its home page, with its standard mix of editor-selected content, with its recently introduced Recommendations page, which shows a ranked list of stories each logged-in user might find interesting based on his or her reading history.

Industry analyst Ken Doctor, a veteran journalist and the author of News-onomics, says most newspapers’ inertia stems in part from a lack of expertise. While editors focus on bringing readers the world, and the business side sells ad space around the articles, no one is left to tackle the considerable problem of delivering customized content.

“Newspaper companies aren’t very tech-savvy,” says Doctor, noting that

sCreenshot FroM THE NEW YORK TIMES