The customized newspaper is right around the corner, if you're willing to go there

Mary Lou Fulton is Vice President of Audience Development at The Bakersfield Californian and a member of the advisory board of the Knight Digital Media Center.

Newspapers are “one size fits all” publications fighting to survive in a world gravitating toward personalized and niche media. But what if you could have the best of both worlds – the serendipity of browsing a newspaper combined with content and advertising that was tailored just for you?

This idea has been kicking around for years, but in Europe, the Swiss Post (that’s the postal service, not a newspaper) and the German tech startup Syntops are making it happen with their Personal News project. This is a small experiment, but a fascinating one that offers a mashup of section fronts from select newspapers in Europe and the U.S. An overview of Personal News, a three-month pilot project that launched in December, was presented by Syntops CEO Gregor Dorsch at this month’s conference on Individuated News.

Here’s how it works:

You register online and select up to seven newspaper sections by checking a box. Participating newspapers include The Washington Post, The Washington Times, Austria’s Der Standard, Switzerland’s Tages-Anzeiger and others. You can change your selections daily as long as you do so before the nightly 7 pm cutoff:

The participating newspapers deliver their product in PDF format to the Swiss Post, which then sends them to Syntops where the company’s custom software, Syntops GmbH, assembles individualized PDFs. The PDFs are printed and dropped off to Swiss Post by 7 a.m. for delivery to the home by 11 a.m. There also is a digital version of Personal News available online.

The front page of Personal News includes a personal greeting (Good Morning, Mary Lou!) and lists your newspaper choices in an index. The interior pages consist of full pages from the selected newspapers, exactly as they appeared in print.

Personal News is offered in limited geographic areas of Zurich. The experiment was marketed to potential subscribers in this area, who agreed to pay 40 Swiss francs, or about $35 USD, to take part in the project. About 250 people are participating so far, and have agreed to provide feedback as part of the study. Results will be announced after the pilot wraps up at the end of February.

This project is a relatively simple example of “mass customization” in that it involves the generation of individualized PDFs that are assembled and then printed one-by-one on a conventional press. This is a much slower process than what is needed for the printing volume of daily newspapers.

The possibilities are more exciting when you considered the capabilities of the newest digital presses, such as those manufactured by the digital press manufacturer Oce, that enable variable printing on the fly. This means that the each newspaper that comes off the press can be uniquely assembled based on the reader’s content and advertising preferences.

Let’s think about what we could do with that.

At a very basic level, readers could exclude sections they don’t want. For example, I go online for classifieds, so don’t bother giving me the print classified sections. While you’re at it, you can keep the sports section. Or maybe just give me the sports section on the weekends.

Whenever newspapers change anything, like taking away a comic strip or the TV listings to save money on newsprint, a certain segment of readers howl and even cancel their subscriptions. With this type of personalization, we’d never have to field a complaint like this again.

We also could give readers a way to opt-in for more coverage on subjects they care about. Or better yet, we could transcend the broad and increasingly useless section categories of newspapers to deliver information focused on important life stages and events. If you’re faced with taking care of an aging parent, information about elder care would be invaluable. If you’re traveling to Africa this summer, wouldn’t it be great to see more news coverage about the region you intend to visit? If you’re trying to lose weight, how about content that helps you achieve that goal?

Many newspaper readers also get news online. What if your online preferences, based on what you read and the habits of like-minded readers, could help to shape what flows into your customized print edition? What if this content also could include the perspectives of your favorite bloggers?

By the way, I’m not suggesting that we create newspapers solely driven by the personal choices of readers, I just want a mix that’s more relevant to me than what any general interest publication can offer.

Now let’s talk about revenue. In addition to the potential for more subscription dollars, consider the possibilities for personalized advertising. Suddenly the newspaper becomes like direct mail, with advertisements customized at the household level and only delivered to readers for whom they are relevant. Readers could even opt-in for the types of advertising content they want, such as vacation deals or sales on back-to-school clothes for kids. When my grandmother was very ill, I would have been so grateful to receive ads for Spanish-speaking home health care providers because it took me forever to track them down through calls to individual agencies. Advertising can become a more valuable and relevant service when imagined in this way.

This year, we’ll see more experiments with mass customization at the Los Angeles Daily News and Investor’s Business Daily. There’s a good roundup of forthcoming initiatives in a recent Seybold Online report. And if you’re looking for inspiration, read Vin Crosbie’s powerful case for mass customization and make plans to attend the Global Conference on Individuated Publishing in Washington DC this June.

Vin summed up the opportunity well in saying, “Give me the consumer the bulletins and urgents plus all the stories about which editors truly think everyone should be informed. But let the consumer pick which sports, teams, and topics fill the rest of the paper. Better that the childless bachelor gets stories about a car he desires than school lunch menus. Better a fashionable young woman gets the stories about the latest couture from Paris and Milan than sports or that AP story on page 7 about record wheat harvests in the Sudan.

“Customization makes the daily newspaper more relevant to each person’s interest and needs. It will make the daily newspaper much, much more valuable.”

About Mary Lou Fulton

Mary Lou Fulton is Vice President of Audience Development at The Bakersfield Californian and a member of the advisory board of the Knight Digital Media Center.

Comments

  1. 77.57.167.233 says:

    Yawn. Don’t need it. I’ve got Google News. You’re talking a life-changing, killer app — that’s it.

    I program my own front page in a few seconds. One can add rubrics from foreign editions, or any search string one wants: the name of a person or company, for example, or the name of a piece of legislation coming down the pike, and — boom! — you’ve got everything that appears in print, anywhere, on that topic — immediately.

    How do you think that I found this article, ‘way out in the wilds of Switzerland? I’ve never heard of OJR: it just washed up on Google News.

  2. even if you got it from Google , means Google know about it and you didn’t 🙂 that’s prove a good way to ‘ share the love ‘ with everyone … including Google who bring you there , welcome 🙂

  3. BTW: In October 2008, Swiss Post bought the early newspaper delivery company Zuvo AG from Tamedia and NZZ Group, two major Swiss newspaper publishers. See http://tinyurl.com/atg2t2

  4. Thanks, all, for the comments.

    Regarding Google News, it’s good at many things, especially national, international and topic-based news.

    However, local news is not a strength. I heard a presentation by a Google executive explaining why.

    First, Google surfaces news based on algorithms that emphasize the importance of hot topics (the news is being mentioned on a lot of sites) and link popularity (the news is being linked from a lot of sites). You could have a local story that is a blockbuster in your hometown, but if it wasn’t mentioned or linked to from many places, Google wouldn’t identify this story as important.

    Second, Google News relies heavily on traditional news organizations to be arbiters of credibility. You could be a local blogger who is a rock star (I think of Bill Pearl in Long Beach, CA, whose lbreport.com site is the best in town) but his stuff is nowhere to be found on Google News.

    Now you can certainly set up RSS feeds and Google Alerts to cover all the bases, but that’s a lot of work that most people don’t have the time for. That’s where a local news organization can play a role, finding and highlighting information available. And through strategies such as personalization, online and in print, making sure you get the information you want.

  5. 76.114.110.213 says:

    Customized newspapers? It would be sufficient customization just to have mine delivered on time, wrapped in plastic when it rains, and not in my street gutter.

  6. 125.168.210.16 says:

    Swiss Post, a newspaper should be delivered by 7:00am at the latest.

    Definitely a market for it and if it had enough local news, it could replace the local paper too.

    http://www.posbrowser.com.au/b2evolution.new/blogs/

  7. 82.231.180.130 says:

    Really interesting article, and a good take on news personalisation.

    Personal News is a nice (if not a little gimmicky) idea – but it doesn’t get away from the biggest reasons for the ever declining circulation of newspaper; people want news fast, and they want it for free. Personalisation is undeniably appealing to readers, but it already works so well online that its prospects in print are dubious.

    I’ve written in greater detail on this topic here: http://www.editorsweblog.org/newspaper/2009/01/personalised_newspapers_industry_saviour.php

  8. Sounds SWEET, Sign me up for it!

  9. Google news allowed us to customize the page layout, as well as create custom keyword-based news sections, it did not go well with the internet users as expected. Likewise, customizing newspaper is a nice concept, may be it would create an impact in the future, but definitely not now.

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