Personalized Newspapers, Only News You See Fit to Print

By Marie D'Amico, 

Only the News You See Fit to Print

Perhaps your day starts similar to mine. Shower, coffee , newspaper . I don’t possess JFK’s legendary ability to read 2500 words per minute, so, although I pay for the entire publication, I read only selected stories and scan and skim the remainder. First! from I ndividual, Inc ., infoSage from International Business Machines (IBM) , and from PointCast Network from PointCast, Inc. are services which produce digital, personalized newspapers containing only the news you see fit to print. Forget newsprint-blackened fingertips and eyestrain caused by searching sources in print and in the 20 million URLs on the WorldWide Web for relevant information. These services, and other less noteworthy ones, are betting you would rather read a customized newspaper delivered right to your desktop than spend your time thumbing, searching, and clicking. They’re probably right.

The Daily Me

Only 61.5 percent of all adults read a daily newspaper, down from 73 percent in 1961 ( see "Electronic Newspaper is an Oxymoron," Vol. 4, No. 12, p. 14 ). Specialized news weeklies which target niche markets, however, are a growing segment of the newspaper industry. In Stewart Brand’s 1987 book, The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT , he said current newspapers are inefficient for both news gatherers and news readers because only 10% of the news collected is printed in the paper and only 10% of that is read. With personalized newspapers, however, 100% of what the newsroom owns can be accessed, and most of what is selectively sent to the reader, would be read. Customized newspapers create "only one copy of The Daily Me, but it would have a devoted readership," he added.

B. Joseph Pine II, author of the book Mass Customization: The New Frontier in Business Competition , says forces are shifting the focus from mass production of goods and services to mass customization, such as personalized newspapers. "Companies evolve into a mass customization system in response to market turbulence. The digital media market is the most turbulent due to deregulation, the changing technology, the technology’s impact, which has reduced the cost of customization, and the growing recognition that the individual customer is the market. Once customers realize they can get customized goods and services at a price they’re willing to pay, quality is no longer a differentiator," he said. Because "anything you can digitize, you can customize," personalized newspapers should be a no-brainer, said Pine. "Even mass customized print newspapers are simply a matter of programming," he added. He cited Farm Journal , a Philadelphia-based print publication with a subscriber base of 800,000, as an example. Based upon customer profiles, the publication prints an average of 7,000 to 10,000 different editions each month, with a watermark high of 100,000 one month, with targeted articles and advertisements based upon each farmer’s personal profile. " The Wall Street Journal , who already knows to whom each newspaper is going, could use the same technology to mix and match its articles and ads to create personalized newspapers," he said.

Personalized newspaper services all create their customized documents the same way. The user completes a personal profile which allows her to select specific topics in which she’s interested (but rarely ones in which she’s disinterested). The topics are not very detailed, rarely use keywords, and don’t permit classifications such as, "I like underdog-type news stories." In an April ’95 article for The Harvard Business Review entitled Do You Want To Keep Your Customers Forever ?, Pine said by using static snapshots of a customer’s preferences, companies aren’t fully exploiting the potential of information technology. The customer and the producer should be in a learning relationship in which, over time, the producer learns more and more about the consumer’s preferences, and gets better at providing them. Once this happens, a competitor will find it almost impossible to lure the customer away. "Because of this singularly powerful competitive advantage, a company that can cultivate learning relationships with its customers should be able to retain their business virtually forever - provided that it continues to supply high-quality customized products or services at reasonably competitive prices and does not miss the next technology wave," the article said.

PCN

PointCast has high hopes for PCN. Founded in 1992 and funded with $12 million of venture capital money, they want PCN to be the "news network for the 21st century." PCN superficially seems similar to other electronic news services. You complete a personal profile where you select topics about which you want to receive news. PCN divides information into five channels, News, Industries, Weather, Sports, and Lifestyle. It searches its sources, creates a customized newspaper divided into these channels, and delivers it to your desktop. You can update your newspaper automatically (as news comes in, it’s sent to you), at scheduled times and days, or manually (if you’re already online).

PCN’s intriguing dissimilarities, however, give it the lemon pledge luster of a winner. First, PCN is free. The New York Times costs me $494 each year, that’s a difference with a distinction and free is a word which entices consumers even more than sale. PCN’s costs are supported completely by sponsors and advertisers whose thirty second icon-sized commercials or logos animate around the main news window. The ads’ small sizes and slow speed should make them tolerable even for channel surfer extraordinnaires. Second, PCN can be an effortless, passive news source. The worldwide ubiquity of broadcast television proves people not only prefer passive sources of news and entertainment, but they’ll pay for them. PCN has a SmartScreen mode in which news headlines appear, as a screen saver, whenever the user’s PC is idle. A click on any headline and the viewer can read the entire feature. All other services require users to actively access their paper either by a downloaded document, facsimile, email, or the Web. PCN’s SmartScreen mode is based upon their research which concluded the average business computer user spends two hours per day in front of an idle PC screen. PCN’s ads and news headlines use few mental CPU cycles, but participating in a business telephone conference and simultaneously scanning or reading an entire newspaper on your monitor may be a bit too much sensory input. Third, PCN’s business model is based upon allowing advertisers to deliver targeted messages to users at work, a traditionally advertisement-free area. And, since all ads run on all PCN channels, PCN can guarantee its advertisers and sponsors 100% of their users.

While PCN shines, it’s still in beta, and should make modifications before it’s commercially available to enhance the service. It should be completely hardware platform independent. PCN’s search engine should become more sophisticated, akin to First!’s search strategy, discussed below. Computers live to search, whether by raw brute force or by intelligence; First!’s profile algorithm, discussed below, incorporates such searching smarts. PCN should take advantage of this attribute to create a smarter, customized newspaper. For example, the personal profile should contain more than topics; it should search based upon detailed keywords. It should contain filters. If users don’t wish to read about the bombing du jour, they should be able to exclude such news articles. Users should be able to read articles based upon their own personal idiosyncrasies and PCN should learn to select these stories. While PCN has inked deals with The Los Angeles Times and The Boston Globe to provide regional news coverage to users in those areas, they should customize each user’s newspaper more based upon where that user lives or where she’s from. MIT’s research ( see Sidebar A ) demonstrates users like a hometown news type of newspaper section.

infoSage

infoSage will become commercially available on April 8th, but it’s too soon to determine whether it will hit or miss. Like all other customized news services, the user completes a personal profile, infoSage scans its information resources, and twice a day, creates and sends you a personalized newspaper via email or the Web. infoSage’s personal profile is more detailed than most of its competitors’ profiles but it still lacks First!’s search smarts. While currently free (but requiring a credit card for usage), IBM anticipates a $24.95 per month price tag. In addition, detailed financial documents will be available on a pay-per-view basis. Since both AT&T and MCI have recently announced unlimited Internet access for $19.95 a month, infoSage’s cost seems out-of-line. Perhaps the "premium content resources not free on the Web," which infoSage accesses justify the tab but that source list isn’t publicly available. Finally, infoSage should be hardware platform independent because while Microsoft has won the desktop wars, the Internet jihad is just beginning.

First!

First!, by I ndividual, Inc , who went pubic on March 15th, supplies most of the features of the other services with some additional spice. First! is a specialized service primarily designed for corporations and large workgroups at an ouch-price starting at $4700 a year for 10 users. Individual has some cheaper, more price-competitive news services called HeadsUp, iNews, and NewsPage. These services are designed for individual consumers, but which generally only provide headlines and require the consumer to request full-text versions of stories or follow provide URLs to the full article.

First! takes customization to a new height. Each week, First! requests users provide relevancy feedback to the articles they received and the system learns about each user’s shifting interests. Even if you apparently read far-ranging topics, after about four to five months, First! will learn what serendipitous stories you like, and achieve a 90% relevancy factor. Pine, who has used First! for a year, said it’s his favorite of all the personalized news services, because "First! has learned all about my particular reading habits." "I won’t switch services because I would then need to teach another computer what First! already knows about me," he added. While First! only has about 4 0,000 customers, they have a retention rate of between 85% and 90%. Now, their battle is attracting new customers. My suggestions would be to lower that price and think of a more passive way to transmit the paper to consumers. In addition, Pine said he would like to see all personalized newspapers’ search algorithms become even better. "For example, I’d like to be able to say, show me today what people interested in architecture thought was relevant yesterday," he said. "Computers have a great brute force ability to do things such as word searches and learning and companies should take advantage of that," he said. So far, they haven’t.

Can You Take it with You?

Can digital newspapers, even carefully customized ones, ever replace print? Studies have shown paper is superior to computer monitors for reading, scanning, and skimming. In Brand’s book, Nicholas Negroponte agreed. "That printed column [middle column in The Wall Street Journal ] is a highly evolved scanning device using four different type faces, two of them in its headlines and it’s a format I’m familiar and comfortable with. Electronic newspapers have to duplicate that level of sophistication, or they won’t make it." Pine, who reads both print and online newspapers daily, agreed. "We need a better mechanism for reading on a computer," he said. "And, while electronic newspapers could eventually take over from print, they’ll never truly replace print until you can take them into the bathroom," he jokingly added.

Sidebar A: The Genesis of Personalized Newspapers

Personalized newspapers may seem spanking new but they aren’t. While an undergraduate student at MIT, Fen Labalme designed an electronic personalized newspaper called "NewsPeek" in 1981 for what became The MIT Media Lab. NewsPeek is described both in Brand’s book and at Labalme’s home page . NewsPeek, designed at a time when free news information from the Web wasn’t even conceivable, contained material drawn from the Dow Jones News Retrieval services , Mead Data Corporation’s on-line news service, Nexis , XPress, television news, and wire services. Its ideas and features, futuristic for ’81, are similar to today’s services. NewsPeek’s topic headlines were "Financial," "International," "Mail," "People," and "Technical." In "Mail," news from the user’s own electronic mailbox was summarized, a feature the current personalized news services should consider. Brand quoted Negroponte as saying this mail may be "news only to him [the user] but it’s the most important of all." Lead paragraphs of articles were displayed. When a user selected the lead paragraph, the entire story filled the screen. Old stories were colored a pale yellow, like aging newsprint, another fascinating feature current NewsPeek incarnations could consider.

The Media Lab’s current incarnation of NewsPeek is Fishwrap (named for the journalistic proverb, "Yesterday’s news wraps today’s fish." The MIT general community has been using it since the fall of ’93. For Fishwrap, the user completes a personal profile. Fifteen seconds later, Fishwrap generates a personalized newspaper which includes geographically relevant information, trends in specific industries, community news, and even a "hometown news" section so users can see what’s happening at home ( see screen shot ). Fishwrap can send its personalized newspapers to users via email, a hypertext document, paper, or even a windowgram, although the primary mode of communication is through hypertext presented through a Web browser. Fishwrap’s focus studies highlighted some of the problems with electronic newspapers. While most users liked the WWW interface, they wanted a more linear approach where they could skim sections. Most users especially liked the ability to get regional news, especially those users from foreign countries and small U.S. towns.

Sidebar B: Similar Services

Other entities have similar services. Relevant Edition , by Dow Jones and Company, designed for workgroups of 15 or more users, generates a personalized newspaper from a personal index completed by the user and a small number of sources. Users can schedule delivery of their personalized newspaper twice a day or fetch it themselves any time of day via electronic mail, and soon via a Web browser. Charges for this content start at a whopping $1,500 per month for up to 15 users. Newshound by The San Jose Mercury News searches a number of newspapers and sends you email every hour throughout the day based upon your personal profile. Cost for charter subscribers is $4.95 per month; the usual rate is $9.95 per month. Relevant Edition contains only inclusive search terms whereas Newshound contains both inclusive and exclusive filters. You can receive a monthly health and wellness newsmagazine personalized for you . Two students from Bucknell University have built a free service called Crayon which generates a customized newspaper built not of articles but of links to relevant news features and sources on the Web.

Sidebar C: Digital Mass Customization

The trend towards mass customization isn’t limited to electronic newspapers. Other industries are using advances in digital technology to target goods and services to the particular needs of individual buyers. In Westport, Connecticut, the Custom Foot shoe store has just started using scanners to produce custom-made shoes, which normally retail for about $500, for $140, the price of high-quality, off-the-shelf shoes. Levi Strauss & Co. has been successfully selling custom-fit jeans, called "Personal Pair," for more than one year even though they cost $15 more than regular jeans and require a wait of two to three weeks. Pine says Personal Pair jeans are selling quite well and will be sold through all 190 Levi’s stores soon. Paris-Miki , the world’s second largest optician’s chain, is test-marketing the use of Unix workstations and scanners to produce, in 24 hours, tailor-made, rimless eyeglasses with shapes designed to enhance the wearer’s face.

Sidebar D: Helpful Web Sites

A URL to almost every online newspaper.

Sidebar E: Mentioned in this Feature

Harvard Business Review , (800) 545-7685

Individual, Inc. , (800) 764-4224

infoSage , (800) 210-5857

Levi Strauss & Co.

MIT Media Lab, (617) 253-0300

PointCast, Inc. , (408) 253-0894,

Paris-Miki ,

The San Jose Mercury News , (800) 818-NEWS

Strategic Holdings, LLP, B. Joseph Pine II, President, Phone: (216) 449-9180, shllp@aol.com .

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