Personalization

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  • Agility Keeps KXTV On Top Of Social Sacramento

    Tegna-owned KXTV holds the lead among local Sacramento media outlets in terms of both total social actions and fans/followers according to Shareablee data. Digital chief Ian Hill says posting lots of family-friendly content and being able to pivot quickly around algorithmic changes has kept the station on top.   More | Add comment

  • In Hartford-New Haven, WFSB Wins Social By A Hair

    It’s a tight social media race in Hartford-New Haven, Conn., where Meredith-owned WFSB has climbed slightly ahead of Comcast-owned WVIT in terms of total social actions, according to Shareablee data. The station’s GM says winning social comes down to treating it just as seriously as its website or broadcast.  More | Add comment

  • NAA’s New CEO: Papers Have Power Against Platform Pressure

    The Newspaper Association of America named its David Chavern its new president and CEO on Thursday after a long search, and the challenges before him are steep. In an exclusive interview with NetNewsCheck, he touches on ad blockers, print rollbacks, distributed content and the prospect of working side-by-side with the television industry as it faces its own disruptions.  More | Add comment

  • Executive Moves At Convergent Mobile, Billboard And Boostability

    There are a number of items on the business development front this week, as Kelly Benish charts executive appointments at Convergent Mobile, CivicScience, Boostability and more. Also this week, executive openings at comScore, CrowdTap and Channel IQ.  More | Add comment

  • Football, Data Make For Seasonal Experiment At South Bend Tribune

    The Schurz-owned South Bend Tribune is taking a new approach to coverage of Notre Dame’s upcoming game with USC next month. It’s bringing in Coach Kevin Kelley, famed for his data-driven approach to high school football, as a guest analyst, and the sponsored coverage will be spun into live events, video and audio for the college football-crazed market. Jake Offenhartz takes a closer look at the game plan.    More | Add comment

  • KDFW Gets Early Start In Dallas’ Social Lead

    Fox Television Stations-owned KDFW holds a clear lead in Dallas-Fort Worth’s social media scene based on data from Shareablee. The station has had nearly 9.2 million social actions in the last six months and is closing in on a million fans/followers. Its newsroom says the foundations for such a strong social platform go back nearly two decades before there was a “social” media.   More | Add comment

  • In Detroit, Free Press Leads A Digital Renaissance

    Detroit is a city on the rebound, and it's reflected by numerous digital experiments and reinventions among its leading media. That's nowhere more in evidence than at the Gannett-owned Free Press, which despite its financial woes and diminished staff, has adopted a playbook of "talking less, launching more," according to Robert Huschka, its new executive editor. Diana Marszalek surveys the resurgence.  More | Add comment

  • WGRZ Takes Buffalo’s Social Lead By Design

    Tegna-owned WGRZ employs a well-calibrated approach to social media, and it has helped the station capture Buffalo, N.Y.’s local lead there according to Shareablee data. Close attention to analytics, plus a heavy measure of sports and weather, is behind the success.   More | Add comment

  • Staff Cuts To Follow La Presse’s Print Rollback

    Montreal’s La Presse newspaper is reducing its print schedule to a single weekly issue in January, a sooner-than-expected validation of its $36 million tablet app gamble. But the shift won’t come without a price: Michael Depp reports that an undisclosed number of layoffs will be announced to staffers next Thursday as the paper introduces “a change of the business model,” according to an executive, who also expects about 30,000 readers to be lost in the transition.    More | Add comment

  • KSTU Claims Salt Lake’s Social Lead

    Tribune-owned KSTU holds a commanding lead over all its local media competition in Salt Lake City (DMA 34) based on Shareablee data. Its news director says a focus on local environmental issues, faith and family has been a boon, and having a couple of newsroom social media ringers hasn’t hurt, either.  More | Add comment

  • Fox-Owned Sites Go Responsive In CMS Shift To Lakana

    Fox Television Stations have relaunched in responsive design, Diana Marszalek reports, having moved off of the Worldnow content management system to Lakana. The shift, which is aimed at being more mobile-friendly and better integrated with Facebook, also comes with a rebranding of most Fox sites, which will drop the "My Fox" moniker in favor of stations' numbers.  More | Add comment

  • Nonprofits Need Pragmatism For A Future

    Kevin Davis has seen the background struggles tearing at nonprofit newsrooms across the country as they weigh journalistic idealism against revenue needs. He argues that nonprofits must remember that they are businesses, too, and pursue fiscal sustainability as they develop their editorial content to meet their mission.     More | Add comment

  • Houston Sites Try To Grow In Chronicle’s Long Shadow

    The Houston Chronicle commands a massive lead in the market’s online readership with a two-site strategy that sees the wealth of its users choosing free, abbreviated content over the depth behind a hard paywall. It’s also executing a multi-front digital revenue strategy with content marketing playing a key role. In this Digital DMA profile, Patrick Duprey takes a closer look at the paper’s efforts and the TV news sites and pureplays chasing behind it.   More | Add comment

  • In Philly, Millennial Boom Town, Audience Fragmentation Touches All

    In the first of our rebooted and expanded Digital DMA profiles, Patrick Duprey looks at how Philadelphia’s news giants Philly.com and WPVI have had to make room for ever-expanding digital competition. Upstarts like Billy Penn and the digitally-robust     Philadelphia Magazine have pushed local TV stalwarts to raise their game amid an ever more fragmented audience.    More | Comments (1)

  • La Presse: Inside the $36M Bet Designed to Transform Newspaper Publishing

    Montreal’s La Presse has broken away from the newspaper pack in charting a course for its future, investing $36 million on a tablet app that it has positioned as its primary product and, ultimately, its main source of revenue. In part one of a five-part Digital Deep Dive, NetNewsCheck Editor Michael Depp explores the iconoclastic vision of Guy Crevier, its publisher, and the remarkable engagement and revenue results the app has achieved in its first two years on the market. You can read the entire series here. More | Add comment

Special Reports

  • Sales Management: The rise of mobile viewing platforms means TV stations have new tools to offer advertisers who want to reach viewers no matter where they are. And it means stations can offer a greater variety of options — and price points — to potential advertisers, many of whom don’t buy time on traditional TV.
  • Community Newspapers: Some of the nation’s smallest newspapers may not be feeling the ad crunch and circulation drops as harshly as their big city cousins. That doesn’t mean they can afford to ignore the growing migration of their readers to digital, let alone the evolving needs of their indispensable mom-and-pop advertisers on the digital plane. In a two-part special report, NetNewsCheck examines how the nation’s community newspapers are handling the digital transition.
  • Big Data: As local media companies eye the potential of big data for deepening their engagement with audiences and advertisers, they are learning just how messy, expensive, incremental and imperfect the process can be.
  • Content Management Systems: Content Management Systems serving the local media industry have taken a quantum leap forward, and choosing the right CMS has become more complicated than ever. In our exclusive special report, NetNewsCheck examines how media companies and vendors are navigating through a terrain of niche CMSs, in-house products and open-source solutions.

Industry Calendar

Net Essentials

Traffic
Can Personalization Save News Homepage?
Journalism.co.uk, May 20, 2014, 2:01 PM EDT
Social media has become the biggest referrer of traffic to many publishers' sites, as readers' visits are based on links shared by their friends and contacts that genuinely interest them, rather than dropping onto a site, looking for news, explains Alastair Reid. AOL, which acquired personalization company Gravity, is looking to develop a personal angle across its sites to give readers the content they want in new and innovative ways.   Link | Add comment
Content
Sailthru's Personalization Ups Engagement
Journalism.co.uk, Oct 7, 2013, 8:37 AM EDT
By using 'smart' data to better understand their audience, publishers can personalize their output to each individual reader, says Cassie Lancellotti-Young, vice president of client analytics and optimisation at Sailthru. Link | Add comment
Commentary by Alan Mutter
Digital Media Get Ready To Get More Personal
Reflections of a Newsosaur, Oct 2, 2013, 11:37 AM EDT
Say good-bye to one-size-fits-all content and advertising. The age of personalization is arriving in the digital media, and it will change everything about what we read, where we eat, what we buy and even how we get to work. Link | Add comment
Weather.com Adds Personalization, Social
TechCrunch, May 3, 2012, 3:14 PM EDT
To celebrate the network's 30th anniversary, The Weather Channel has added personalization and social integration to its Weather.com home page. Link | Add comment
Zite Explores How Many People Share Tablets
PaidContent, Oct 24, 2011, 8:26 AM EDT
Zite, one of several companies building news-reader products for tablets, launched a new feature Friday in response to an internal study that suggests people are sharing tablets within a household. Link | Add comment
Zite Personalizes News Content On The iPad
Scobleizer, Sep 22, 2011, 7:42 AM EDT
Zite CEO Mark Johnson: "One thing that people don’t know about Zite is that we’re almost six years old as a company, so we’ve been developing technology for all this time … so it turns out there’s a lot of great technology under the hood that allows us to figure out exactly the kinds of things you like to read and give you more of it." Link | Add comment
Letter From Zite CEO Mark Johnson
Zite, Aug 31, 2011, 7:17 AM EDT
CNN Buying News Reader Zite For $25M
Techvibes, Aug 23, 2011, 7:42 AM EDT
Personalized news reader Zite is in the process of being acquired by CNN for $20-25 million. Link | Add comment
Zite CEO Wants To Change Pubs’ Impressions
PaidContent, Apr 27, 2011, 3:53 PM EDT
Mark Johnson, the new CEO of iPad news-reading app Zite, says his company wants to find a way to work with news publishers rather than be their competition. Link | Add comment
Zite Wants To Play Nice With Publishers
The New York Times, Apr 26, 2011, 7:49 AM EDT
News aggregator Zite Monday released a new version of its app intended to quell the criticism from publishers. Zite also named Mark Johnson, a longtime adviser to the company, as its new CEO. Link | Add comment
Personal Mag Apps Help Readers Handle Web
Time , Apr 15, 2011, 2:43 PM EDT
Personalized-magazine applications use cues such as recommendations from friends and reading habitsto pull in articles that will capture a reader's interest and declutter it, presenting text and pictures in a streamlined manner more reminiscent of a print publication than a Web site. Link | Add comment
Executive Q&A; With Vic Savelli
TheDailyYou: Radio's Personalized Portal
NetNewsCheck.com, Oct 21, 2010, 8:26 AM EDT
Most radio stations have not approached the Internet aggressively, but don't tell that to Archstream Media. The company has launched personalized portals under TheDailyYou.com brand in two radio markets. NetNewsCheck spoke with Archstream's Vic Savelli about the sites. Full Story | Comments (1)
Google Personalizes Logo For Your Birthday
Google System Blog, Oct 18, 2010, 8:20 AM EDT
Facebook: In 5 Years, All Media Personalized
PaidContent, Sep 30, 2010, 7:03 AM EDT
In the next three- to five years, a website that isn’t tailored to a specific user’s interest will be an anachronism, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg said. Link | Add comment
NY Times Preps News.me Personalized News
New York Times, Sep 10, 2010, 8:13 AM EDT
The News.me product has been in the works with technology incubator Betaworks for the last six months and is expected to be  out sometime later this year. It will initially debut as an iPad application, although a Web version may be introduced at some point. Link | Add comment
How Publishers Are Making News Personal
eMedia Vitals, Sep 2, 2010, 2:29 PM EDT
News organizations such as The Los Angeles Times continue to experiment with personalization, using customization as both a content and advertising initiative. The Times worked with VisualDNA to create a virtual quiz called Newsmatch, which helps readers create a personalized homepage based on their interests and preferences. Link | Add comment
Let 1,000 Personalized Newspapers Bloom
GigaOM, Aug 30, 2010, 6:55 AM EDT
Paper.li pulls in your Twitter stream and extracts any links that have been shared and then displays those links in a newspaper-style format.
 Link | Add comment
Commentary
Shifting To Personalized Social News Streams
Mashable, Aug 11, 2010, 7:30 AM EDT
Readers who still actively seek out the news want, and almost expect, it to be personalized and customized to their tastes and interests. News organizations, social networks and technology companies are all attempting to respond with sites and tools that address this changing shift toward a personalized social news stream. Link | Add comment
Commentary
Personalized Retargeting Is Overkill
AdExchanger.com, Aug 5, 2010, 3:32 PM EDT
Flipboard: A Personal Mag From Social News
TG Daily, Jul 21, 2010, 11:57 AM EDT
A new iPad application described as a 'social magazine' aims to present Twitter and Facebook news feeds in a standard magazine format.
Link | Add comment
Apollo's Aim: Personalized 'Paper Of Future'
TechCrunch, Jul 16, 2010, 8:44 AM EDT
Apollo for iPad is similar to Pandora in that it uses an algorithm (using factors such as time spent on articles, sources favorited, articles liked/not-liked as well as social elements like Twitter and Facebook mentions and similar peoples’ tastes etc.) to help users discover the best content for them in a variety of categories. Link | Add comment
WashPost Buys Personal News Aggregator
VentureBeat, Jul 15, 2010, 7:14 AM EDT
The Washington Post Company has acquired iCurrent, an online tool that allows users to collect news automatically according to their interest. The purchase price was not disclosed, but  was likely north of $5 million. Link | Add comment
Click for screenshot
Google News Redesigns: Local & Personal
TechCrunch, Jun 30, 2010, 5:27 PM EDT
After months of testing, Google News is unveiling “the biggest redesign since the beta launch in 2002,” says director of product management Ben Ling. The main new elements of the page include new navigation by trending topics in the left pane, a personalized news stream in the middle pane, and localized news and weather in the right-hand pane.
Link | Add comment
Consumers Like Personalized Email For Ads
DMNews, Jun 8, 2010, 11:05 AM EDT
Senators Seek Opt-In For Facebook Personalization
All Facebook, Apr 28, 2010, 8:58 AM EDT
Senator Charles Schumer of New York and a number of other Democratic Senators announced that they would like Facebook to make their new “Instant Personalization” service “Opt-In” rather than “Opt-Out” by default. Link | Add comment
f8 Conference
Facebook Open Graph Personalizes The Web
Mashable, Apr 21, 2010, 4:34 PM EDT
Facebook has created a platform that allows sites and apps to share information about users in order to tailor offers, features and services to  each one’s interests and tastes — even if that individual has never visited the site before. Link | Add comment
In UK, Personal Webpages For Gov't Services
PSFK.com, Mar 29, 2010, 11:21 AM EDT
Google News Looks To Personalization
Washington Post, Mar 23, 2010, 10:28 AM EDT
Krishna Bharat, the creator of Google News, talked about two other areas Google News will be focusing attention going forward: personalization and wisdom of crowds. Link | Add comment
Google Personalizes Search With Star System
TechCrunch, Mar 4, 2010, 9:03 AM EST
Logged-in users can "save" favorite results for later sessions by starring them, which moves them to the top of the page. Link | Add comment
Our Take

Google's search stars are useful and work across products - locations that we saved for directions in Google Maps several weeks ago show up today when we do a related web search. Seems like easy ways to save favorite content would be a great feature for any site - local news, local movies, local comments or classified.

Personal TV: In the Future, Ads Will Skip You
Salon, Feb 16, 2010, 8:12 AM EST
2009 put the "i" in web personalization
ReadWriteWeb, Dec 29, 2009, 9:04 AM EST
Open data and recommendation engines moved the web forward toward more widespread relevance. Link | Add comment
Google quietly adds search personalization
Seed Magazine, Dec 18, 2009, 8:56 AM EST

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Opinions
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Ideas
  • Radio Needs To Fight To Remain In Cars

    Eric Rhoads on a prediction from panelists at Radio Ink's Convergence conference that car companies are phasing out radios in the dashboard: Radio stations "had better start working out a strategy to strengthen your brand relationship with your audience now so they'll still seek you out when they have tens of thousands of other choices."

  • The Next Newspaper Revolution

    Gary Stein, senior VP of strategy and planning at marketing agency iCrossing: "The biggest benefit for advertisers is for the newspaper industry to stop thinking of the product they create as being 100 sheets of paper with news on it. Rather, the industry needs to see itself as creating relationships that keep people informed. If it does that, then it is putting that consumer in the center."

  • Journalism’s Problem Is A Failure Of Originality

    Kelly McBride of Globe and Mail: "Our originality breakdown results from many pressures – the overwhelming volume of writing incessantly pushed out into the digital space, the pressure on writers to feed a content beast that’s never satiated, the diminishing economic forces that support professional writing."

  • 2 Moves That Say A Lot About Twitter's Future

    Mathew Ingram: "As it cuts off the third-party developers (and in some cases users) who helped generate much of its success, signs of where Twitter is headed are also abundant: they can be seen in the deals that the company has signed with corporate partners such as NBC."

  • Are Metered Paywalls A Mistake?

    Steve Outing points out the problems with metered paywalls and offers an alternative: "What I’m suggesting is putting editors back in the driver’s seat (to a degree), by selecting the best 10 articles or other news content of the day for non-paying website users."

  • Mobile And The Media's Imploding Biz Model

    Michael Wolff: "If the news business on the Web is depressing, contributing to the existential angst that has gripped every established news organization, mobile turns the story apocalyptic: there is no foreseeable basis on which the news establishment can support itself. There is no way even a stripped-down, aggregation-based, unpaid citizen-journalist staffed newsroom can support itself in a mobile world."

  • Paywalls Open Doors For Local News Sites

    Howard Owens: "As a matter of business reality, when an incumbent business moves deeper into sustaining innovation it opens up opportunities for disruptors. In every market where a newspaper puts up a paywall, an opportunity is created for an entrepreneur to start a local online news business."

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