Tuesday, February 01, 2005

Personalizing print newspapers

Aaron Berman at Presstime writes about personalized news in print:
    The difference in logistical complexity between producing a customized monthly and a similarly personalized newspaper certainly is enormous, says Douglas Karr, database marketing manager at The Indianapolis Star. But, he adds, the industry will have to embrace some level of personalization if it wants to meet consumer expectations.

    "We're still trying to please everybody with one product," Karr says. "I think the day is coming when we'll have to please everybody with their own product."
Given that newspapers haven't even started doing personalization for their online sites -- where personalization is relatively inexpensive -- personalizing individual print newspapers seems unlikely to happen soon. But it's great to see people like Douglas Karr thinking ahead about how to best serve readers.

[via John Burke]

1 comment:

Seun Osewa said...

On the web, you can put all the news reports in a database and have people look for exactly what they want. But in print media, there's a limit on how much material you can print per edition, so there's arguably more of a reason to use AI to choose articles for each subscriber.