Friday, February 18, 2005

Matching content to audiences

Newspapers are increasingly talking about personalized news. Mary Lou Fulton (VP, Bakersfield Californian) recently said:
    What if we thought about it a different way, and thought of our pool of content (local, wires, syndicated content, etc) separately from a single newspaper. We could slice and dice that content differently and come up with many versions of the publication for many audiences.
Mary Lou's comments are similar to what Tom Curley (CEO, Associated Press) proposed a few months ago.

Content is king. Newspapers should exploit new distribution systems to get their content in front of the right audiences.

4 comments:

stevex said...

Check out my own Long Tail explorer site.. The Long Tail of the Blogosphere. I hate that name. :)

Sean said...

Increasingly?

Seun Osewa said...

Or, you could create 3-8 different 'flavours' of your newspaper for different classes of people, e.g. students, engineers, doctors ...

Greg Linden said...

Thanks, Steve. I'll check that out.

That's an interesting point, Seun. The traditional approach to this is segmentation -- just look at all the specialized magazines and newspapers out there -- but it's too coarse-grained. Not all students, engineers, and doctors are interested in the same news.