Individuate me!

Yep, yep and yep.

I think many news outlets are making this whole personalization thing more complicated than it has to be.

I'm a big believer in using the tools people are already using to your own site's benefit.

Well said. Even sites like CNN and Yahoo!, which offer extensive personalization, see only a small percentage of their audience actually use it.

My favorite personalization engine? My RSS aggregator (Bloglines).

I must disagree, Jay.

If you improve the regular reader's experience, then you earn a bit more of their monthly attention. Personalization is a tool for your regular readers that prioritizes the vast depth of the site and shows them the best of what you have right now -- as it relates to them.

Unfortunately, most of the current options fail in two ways. First, they are far too expensive for the PodunkPrattler to implement. Second, they require reader intervention to set up and train the system. If it's to get any sort of traction with readers, it needs to interpret implicit gestures and provide noticably better results. I don't think anyone's nailed this yet.

[...] for whom I have great respect, has responded to my recent blog post about individuated news: “Individuate Me!.” In it, he challenges the wisdom of making personalized news a priority. Here’s my [...]

Jay: My response is on my blog:
http://steveouting.com/2008/06/27/a-defense-of-personalized-news/

Thanks for noticing! Interesting discussion. -Steve

Steve: Thanks for checking in and for your response, which I'll recommend to the rest of the commenters here.

It appears you're making two arguments: one for opening the news conversation beyond just so-called "professional" news organizations, and one for making individual news sites into aggregators/filters/portals for news from many sources.

I definitely, wholeheartedly agree with the first line of reasoning. News can and should be a participatory activity, and opening up that dialogue can only help individual sites gather interest around the content they seed into it.

I might go as far as to agree that any content Web site can/should incorporate aggregation tools that bring links to related content -- and to that extent, allow users to choose which links are displayed and how. I use Drupal's rudimentary aggregator on this rudimentary site, so I do see some value in that activity.

I don't believe that's nearly as high a priority, however, as developing content, communities and transparency of both into the broader worlds of search and syndication.

Jason: Why would I ever expect an individual newspaper site to be my destination for an "instinct engine" personal news experience, when even the big guys don't really do what you describe well? And how does that deal with the behavior that favors ad hoc search for ad hoc needs?

Great discussion - Sad thing I missed the conference.

As the owner of a company who enables newspaper to actually personalize all media and platforms out of the box I can give you another reason, why newspapers should invest in personalization: it is the only thing people are willing to pay for on the web! People as users only pay for service and if you offer a very good service; one that helps you at all times, allows you to never miss a thing that is important to you and gives you access to it in a flexible and convenient way: Skip the subscription; I am buying that thing!

We actually see people spending up to 10 / 15 Euro for the service a month ( which also allows them to order the newspaper home ad hoc by text message). They only pay on demand; no monthly rate associated.

So I think newspapers NEED to offer personalization in order to tap into people's pockets again.

I actually attended the conference you're talking about. I found it interesting on a number of levels -- but primarily in that it opened my eyes to how many of the technologies needed to personalize print are available TODAY. The challenge of individuating / personalizing (whatever you want to call it) is not in how to do it, but where, how and why. The tools are there and it's just a matter of stitching them together to create a consumer experiences that makes sense.

I think we all have our biases about this, and I certainly have mine. I think there may be some value in a customized daily newspaper, but more as a niche product or a supplement to an existing subscriber. I could imagine someone calling to cancel their 7-day subscription because they don't have time to read it, and opting to receive a once or twice-weekly wrapup of the story categories they care most about. They could chose to read that content online, an/or in the custom print / newsletter the paper sends to their mail box.

I don't think that's the biggest opportunity, though. The larger challenge we face has little to do with print-versus-online or even lack of personalization. It's that audiences are generally moving away from general interest information products, and toward niche information products. This is true across all media, both analog and digital. And it's even true outside of media. One-size-fits-all is so yesterday.

That's a harder problem to solve if you're a company that has created only one branded product in one medium for most of your existence.

In Bakersfield we've done more than most independent newspapers to serve niche audiences with unique brands (we have 11 now, 6 of which also have print products). We now see ourselves more as a network of local information brands than just one newspaper. This strategy is succeeding in expanding our market share of local readers/participants and advertisers, but it needs to happen faster and with less need for staff for every single niche. Some are simply too small for that.

This is the opportunity Printcasting (http://printcasting.com) will begin to explore in March of next year. We'll make tools available to average people that let them create publications about what interests them, using content in blogs (their own content, and from others). This will result in new print-ready magazines, some of which attract larger audiences and some of which don't. By larger I mean 500+ readers. If we see some that show promise, we'll print and distribute them to target audiences with additional advertising that we sell.

We're comfortable giving away that publishing capability because the value is all in providing the network and being able to advertise across it. That's very different from personalizing a newspaper. But as I said, I think the individuated newspaper could be one of many niche products like the ones I described.