Why publishers should be tailoring our news

Editors don’t know what’s important to me. Or you. Or anyone besides themselves, unfortunately.

We, as readers, have always curated our news, and chosen what we wanted to read. Before news went digital, we’d flick through a paper till we found something that piqued our interest, and then read that. It’s rare that a reader would ever read everything from front to back, as the editors intended – it just doesn’t work like that.

For a printed edition, editors have to try their utmost to put the “most important” stories on the front page, and then work back, but it’s really just guess work on their part. It’s an important part of an editorial role, but it’s still just a guess and even if it’s a good guess, the outcome can never be right for all the the paper’s readers simultaneously.

People have different interests, and it’s time news organisations recognised that and actively responded.

Since digital news became the norm, tailored content has become reasonable; a news experience personalised to a specific reader. So, when you visit a news site, regardless of whether you go to the homepage or to an article, you’d see something different to me, based on your interests, previous activity and so on. And I would see something different.

But who should see what? Jonathan Stray proposes three answers:

“You should see a story if:

- 1. You specifically go looking for it.
- 2. It affects you or any of your communities.
- 3. There is something you might be able to do about it.

Interest, effects, agency. These are three ways that a story might intersect with you, and they are reasons you might need to see it.”

Stray admits that his theory doesn’t quite work out; what about the need to see items of news that fall outside your recognised areas of interest – those that have a historical importance, for example. I won’t go into the details of how we might set up an algorithm and what factors we should consider here, but would recommend Stray’s piece if you’re interested.

My point is more that publishers are, on the whole, refusing to recognise this reader requirement.

Increasingly we’re seeing that people get their news from Twitter, for better or worse. Why? Because it’s a news experience they have complete control over. You follow those people and accounts that tweet things of interest to you, and build up a stream of relevant and interesting content over time that is completely unique to you; why wouldn’t you want to consume news from such a personalised and uniquely tailored point of contact?

And off the back of this carefully hand-crafted news experience that you’ve inadvertently taken hours to construct, many third parties are making successful apps that better harness your tailored news experience. Summify (now acquired by Twitter) sent you a set amount of popular stories based on what those you follow had been tweeting for the last 24 hours.

Zite and Flipboard similarly create personalised digital magazines based on your interests. Each edition is different and unique to the reader, and involves news from an amalgamation of different content sources and publishers. To prove the value readers see in these apps and experiences, we can turn to the sums of money being thrown around. Flipboard was valued in 2011 at $200 million, and Zite was acquired earlier this year by CNN for a cool $20-$25 million. It’s a rapidly expanding and lucrative space to play in, clearly.

But what have we seen from the publishers themselves thus far? I’d argue very little. Readers are clearly crying out for personalised experiences, with more and more traffic hitting just one article on news websites, and bounce rates on the rise as readers drop directly in and out of a single article from their Twitter stream. A standardised and static news site, just isn’t working for the majority of online readers – especially the homepage, which is often being skipped out altogether.

Still, some forms of personalised news from publishers do exist. As mentioned above, CNN acquired Zite for in excess of $20 million, claiming that they’d be putting yet more money into the team.

A little closer to home, the Olympics is providing the opportunity for experimentation. The Times homepage (free to access) allows you to open or close their live “hub” on the homepage and determine whether you want to be bombarded with sporting updates or not. Not everyone is going Olympic mad, and recognising that is the first step to a personalised experience. The Guardian also offers a similar hide/show option, as was used when covering the royal wedding in 2011.

But this isn’t ground-breaking. The BBC have taken their tailoring one step further, allowing readers to “favourite” teams, athletes and sports for a personalised Olympic consumption experience. Primarily, a feed of latest news for your 5 selected favourites appears at the top of every page (but can be hidden). The experience then gets richer when you travel to the “Favourites” section, where you’ll find the entire page populated by content that you’ve specifically requested.

It’s clever, but I just don’t understand why it’s taken the Olympics to eek out tailored content experiences from the publishers themselves. Yes, these things require developer power and thought, but the incentive and demand is clearly there given the high valuations of third party apps exploiting the gap in the market.

You could also argue that social Facebook readers are providing a tailored experience, offering articles based on what’s popular with your friends. It seems logical to assume you’ll have similar interests to your friends, but it turns out a lot of my Facebook friends just read crap. So do yours, I imagine. A more personal experience is needed, and publishers should be striving to deliver it.

Creating a tailored news environment would mean that publishers can begin to claim back more homepage traffic, and cut out third party apps. News orgs should start offering the news that the reader wants to read, more easily, and reap the benefits of greater site interaction: a more engaged readership, greater click-throughs, increased advertising consumption and revenues, lower bounce rates, and a higher rate of return visits. A tailored experience is also one I’d more readily pay for.

Can you think of a good personalised news experience? Don’t think tailoring content is a good idea? Comment or tweet @wannabehacks.

chrisorr

There's much more to editing than “just guess work” – it's a craft based on judgement above all else.

I'm concerned about algorithms curating the flow of information. Tailored news shows us what we want to read but not what we need to read. It's a question of balance: the best editing is balanced – showing us a bit of both.

Human editors, while by no means perfect, have embedded ethics and provide a better balance than algorithmic editors that can throw things way out of balance. They need to be coded to look beyond relevance: show us different points of view and news which is important, challenging and, sometimes, makes us feel uncomfortable.

By the way, I only stumbled on this site today. It's great. I think I'll be sticking around!

anon87

Have to disagree with this. News shouldn't be tailored to what you want to read but what you need to. It's important that the MailOnline has stories about Syria next to ones about Kristen Stewart, otherwise people's perspective would become more and more insular. News isn't meant to be a hobby, it's an important public service. Equally, often people's interests are struck by something out of their ordinary scope, and may be outraged/ inspired/ upset by something that they might not expect to care about, if you personalise surely you lose the potential for that?

SamCreighton

@anon87 I do agree that news publishers have a responsibility to educate people (although I think this is their secondary, rather than primary, function) and that therefore they should be give audiences important content that is not in their usual field of interests. However, I don't think these are mutually exclusive goals as I doubt any publisher will stop having a generic and broad front page once they set up a personalised service, of course this is just an assumption, but I reckon there would be two front pages that you could tab between.

Undoubtedly, some people may choose to ignore the main front page and anything other than celebrity news etc but if so it's a) a bit wrong and condescending to force 'important' news onto them and b) they probably wouldn't be going on the site if they didn't have the personalised option.Personalised news seems to me as the obvious next step for news organisations and, as the article says, I'm just surprised it's taken this long...

anon87

@SamCreighton I wasn't meaning to suggest that news should be forced onto anyone. Rather, what I meant, was that in terms of my news consumption, I want to be given what is considered by editors to be the important news of the day rather than by what a computer algorithm thinks I want to read. In fact I think the latter is the ore condescending of the two.

I don't feel above anyone enjoying Kristen Stewart news, I read the article just like everyone else, but it's important that I did. People need a wide base of popular culture knowledge to successfully exist socially. That's not something which I'm dictating, it's something consumers look for.

I use a particular news service (and in fact pay money for the Times online) not because they write better than another, but because to me they consistently highlight important issues, whether or not I'm interested in each one individually. You get rid of that and all you've got is a glorified twitter stream.

SamCreighton

@anon87 Is an algorithm more condescending? Surely it would just be giving you content that is tagged as related to interests that you have told them publisher that you have. The editor on the other hand is giving you what they think is important in the world... I think both have advantages and disadvantages but I wouldn't say the editor's choice is less condescending.

I agree that pop-culture and celebrity news is interesting and fun, I have skimmed an article about the Kristen Stewart furore and I follow other gossipy things more closely. I thought you were implying with your original post, I apologise if I'm mistaken, that what is going on in Syria is 'better' or more important for people to read and that it is an obligation of news outlets to drag people to them. While for my tastes, global affairs is more engaging than celebrity, but I feel a bit uncomfortable dragging people to content they actually don't want to get. What's important is to make the content available and, like I said, I don't think having a personalised news service constructed along an algorithm would make this any more difficult than it is now. I think it would actually get more people to the site in the first place who might then stumble across the other content.The problem with modern journalism and why traditional media outlets are seeing declining circulations and more democratic forms of news gathering are seeing booming interest is because journalists and editors aren't actually very good at gauging what people want to read. They are brilliant at creating engaging content but news outlets need to start letting the audiences drive the agenda. I think the ideas out-lined in the article above are a good way to start doing this.

JonathanEx

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Although not news - one area where personalisation has sort of been seen before is the previous BBC homepage, choosing topics and interests. But that's been dropped, as under 10% of people actually really used it: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/bbcinternet/2011/12/bbc_homepage_your_feedback_2.html

That's not to say personalisation is good/bad, just a stat to give some thinking on the wider use of doing it in that way.

I wonder if another thing holding it back - individual publishers might just not have enough data yet. If so many hits are one-read bounces, how can they know anything of that person's interests? People are personalising already, but that's by going to multiple sources. And maybe that's okay.

Look at how terrible personalised advertising is - and they've got tons of data to build on, but when you go on Facebook, it's often as simple as "you girl, you relationship, so you want wedding stuff". Google adverts are often just nagging for sites you've visited already. If internet companies haven't got personalisation smooth yet, I wish the developers good luck.

...just some random thoughts there to add more fuel for other people to discuss. I think some aspect of personalisation is good in a reader - but a good editor should know what their readers would want and their input is important... and it's finding the right balance of that probably.

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