The Future of Personalization at News Websites

Abstract

This is the accepted version of the paper.This version of the publication may differ from the final published version. Permanent repository link IntroductionAlthough, in the US, the internet has now overtaken newspapers as a source of news (Purcell et al, 2010), the traditional newspaper-and broadcast-providers remain responsible for the bulk of news consumed online. Nearly all of the top 25 most-viewed news websites in the US are either established news brands or aggregator sites that take most of their content from existing news providers (Pew, 2011). The hopes and fears of the early analysts (for example: Negroponte, 1995;and Sunstein, 2002) that the internet's potential to democratize publishing would lead to the eclipse of traditional mass media news organizations have not been realized. Although there has been a huge increase in blogs and other forms of independent online publishing, very few are viewed by a mass audience (Hindman, 2008), and they are almost exclusively dependent on newspaper and broadcast networks for the stories they discuss (Pew, 2010a).However, the established media face a number of challenges in relation to their internet sites; and personalization, the subject of this paper, is both a cause and a response. The challenges arise, in large part, from the consumption patterns of the online audience, and from the economics of advertising, which provides the primary means of support for online news publications. Because the online audience is relatively promiscuous (Pew, 2010b), and only stays on individual websites a short time, building loyalty has been difficult for news websites. In addition, the ability to track users as they move around the web means that advertisers can identify and target their desired upmarket audience without necessarily having to advertise on premium news websites. As a result, premium publishers have been losing advertising sales 1 ; furthermore, as online advertising becomes more sophisticated, 2 the publishers' margins are being squeezed by the companies that collect user and This is a preprint of an article whose final and definitive form has been published in Journalism Studies © 2012 Taylor & Francis; Journalism Studies is available online at informaworld TM : http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10. 1080/1461670X.2012.664341 2/18 behavioural data to target advertising, and by those that host online advertising delivery platforms.Personalization has emerged as an increasingly popular strategy for news publishers, who hope that it can increase their sites' 'stickiness', and allow them to capture data about users, thus reducing their dependence on the external suppliers of such information.3 Recent examples include The Washington Post's Trove, a site that "aggregates news and enables users to personalize their news stream based on their interests" (Lavrusik, 2011) and The New York Times-backed News.me, which "uses artificial intelligence to…learn what [people] like to read… [and] provides articles and links…of interest" (Wortham, 2011). This paper addres...

Newspaper Consumption in the Digital Age

“…One hypothesis is that the increasing consumption of news on office computers in the workplace (see: Boczkowski [2010] and Thurman and Walters [2013]) privileges publications that suit users' privacy concerns (Boczkowski 2010, 127) by, for example, avoiding forms of content and presentation that might draw the disapprobation of managers or co-workers; and that have a reader profile that more closely matches the demographics of white collar workers. Another hypothesis is that these newspaper websites have succeeded because they have done a better job in delivering content geared to a web audience "not bounded by geography or social class" (Oremus 2012), and in formats tailored to the online medium and its consumption patterns, formats that include live blogs (see : Thurman and Walters [2013]) and that adapt content to users' explicitly stated or implicitly determined preferences (see Thurman [2011] and Thurman and Schifferes [2012]). …”

“…Newspapers are increasingly making their content available through mobile 'apps': of the nine national newspapers in the UK and US that Thurman and Schifferes (2012) surveyed between October-December 2010, all but one had a mobile 'app', and, on average, the newspapers provided 'apps' for 2.2 different platforms.…”

Interactivity features of Online Newspapers: from a facsimile model to a multimedia model one. Interactivity in online journals.

“…It is one of the trends in the content supply by new online media business models (Campos Freire, 2010). Thurman (2011) and Thurman and Schifferes (2012) syndication by e-mail; b) implicit personalization: information or visual appearance is inferred from the user navigation data.…”

Online News Production, Consumption and Immediacy: The Remediation Perspective

“…Likewise, social researchers have not paid much attention to e-papers. On the other hand, there is a growing interest in investigating the personalization of news (Thurman & Schifferes, 2012) through the use of mobile news apps (Weiss, 2013) and social media (Lee & Ma, 2012), commonly associated with the use of mobile phones. The popularity of the versatile portable devices over the single-task ereader as a way to access news is evident.…”