Everyone in the world should be able to have his or her own personal newspaper.
And perhaps someday, everyone will.
If you consider all of the content of current news providers to make up a virtual newsstand, then everyone should be able to pick the content of their very own newspaper every day, have it printed and delivered to them at home, at work or at a local coffee shop, wherever.
In the end, newspapers would cease to be about what’s “officially” happening in the world, and would become a reflection of an individual’s perception of what’s happening the world. Put another way, people would be able to follow their keen interests in the world every day, instead of having to ferret out their interests from under the complicated hodge-podge of news that is presented to them everyday.
People would get in the habit of showing each other their newspapers and thus express their identities, perhaps even more directly and vividly than their clothes, their cars, their perfume, their college, their jobs currently do.
Your newspaper may lead off with an environmental breakthrough concerning global warming, the current grand slam tennis tournament halfway round the world, a piece about a new museum opening in a small town on the other side of the globe, and an obit of a rock star.
My newspaper the same day, might be much more national in interest and lead off with the day’s DOW, carry a piece on the NBA season, review the best off-broadway play currently on view in New York, and guess at the frontrunners for that year’s OSCAR movies.
You name it, your newspaper and my newspaper would both be absolutely uptodate, but quite different in makeup, due to our personalities and interests, developed through answers that we both had given in a survey that we had both filled out, leading to a software program that each day searches the virtual newsstand for relevant stories.
Your newspaper would reflect you and my newspaper would reflect me.
Many people worry that readers would lose that context that is given to them by the so-called “news of the day” as presented on television, on the web and in traditional newspapers everywhere, repetitively.
Not true, because the “news of the day” would still be available on television, on the web and in traditional newspapers everywhere, repetitively.
The personal newspaper would be a new experience. A separate news product.
Nuclear families would need not one newspaper but four, just as they now need not one phone but four.
Subscribers would have their choice of hundreds of news outlets to get their news instead of one, just as cable has given subscribers their choice of hundreds of channels.
Newspapers would finally have exited the 19th Century when mass production was the driving force. And joined the 21st Century where personalization is the driving force. Peter Van

What a fascinating prototype the New York Times is putting up. The belief that a personalized homepage subverts the role of the website is wrong. It obliterates it. From the ashes, rises a whole new product. Peter Van

The Mixed Blessing of 'Personalized News'

NYTimes.com is ready to launch a new function allowing readers to personalize their news habits -- on the advice of Times writers and editors. But maybe I'd rather have my news filtered by a computer.

By David S. Hirschman (May 11, 2006) -- When the New York Times printed a special section of the paper on May 2nd to trumpet many of the upcoming features soon to be integrated into NYTimes.com, it was unsurprising to learn that the site would include more original reporting, more multimedia offerings, blogs, and even ways to navigate through the most popular stories on the paper's site.But what caught my eye was a new "personalization" feature called "My Times," which will allow readers to create a personalized Times homepage so that they might organize the articles they read (in addition to outside blogs and Web sites) to suit their interests.

"Personalization" is a hot buzzword in online newspapering these days. On the surface, it doesn't seem like such a bad concept. As technology becomes more advanced and there is a growing glut of online information, many news sources are focusing on providing ways for readers to filter and pre-sort the kind and amount of content that passes onto their radar.But My Times, which is set to launch internally over the next few days and then will be up and ready by June 1st, has an important difference: NYTimes.com readers will actually be shown how to model their homepages after the preferences of their favorite Times reporters/columnists.
The insert extolled the "guidance and expertise" of such writers, noting that they would offer their "informed editorial judgment" to readers about their areas of interest.
"You can see what sites [reporter] Linda Greenhhouse reads to get information about the Supreme Court," Times spokeswoman Diane McNulty told me, when asked for an example. She said that the new function would create a guided tour of the paper (and the Web beyond) for readers.Setting aside the obvious journalist-as-celebrity questions (i.e. "Who is Edward Wong or David Carr that I should care what blogs they frequent? Aren't they just reporters? Isn't it about 'the news'?"), the Times is also pulling a pretty neat trick. In allowing readers to customize their own pages, the paper is essentially deconstructing the importance of editors' choices as expressed in the print paper (in the way an editor confers importance on an issue by putting one story on Page One, and another deep in a corner of the Metro section); it's saying that readers can decide for themselves what they want to see first in the paper, and lets them bury stories they presume they would not find interesting. But by then turning around and offering the "informed editorial judgment" of writers and editors as a "guide," the Times is subtly trying to take back some of the editorial decision-making power it has ceded (even if the reporters are only providing "guidance"). In essence, it is reasserting the importance of its brand and the "discriminating" tastes of the individuals who make up that brand.***Though I'm interested in her picks in a voyeuristic kind of way, I'm pretty sure even without testing My Times that I don't want Times book critic Michiko Kakutani filtering my news for me. But I've been thinking a lot lately about whether I would trust the task to a computer program. Perhaps one that knows me well, or even too well.Once we've integrated this idea of news customization by personal choice (or by-whim-of-Frank-Rich), the next logical step is for newspaper websites to automatically customize themselves to highlight and emphasize news articles similar to other articles the reader has previously enjoyed and registered as a preference. Or further, for a news aggregator to personally filter our news for us from sources from around the world.Remy Stern, online editor of the now-defunct Radar Magazine, likens this idea to what has been going on in the "music space" on the web. "Enormous work has gone into creating customized audio streams based on user preferences," says Stern. "It's complex technology. As I listen to more and more music using Pandora and Last.fm, it gets a better sense of what I like and don't like and more intelligently delivers the kind of music I'm bound to enjoy." Amazon.com has done this for years, and Netflix offers similar technology in recommending DVDs to rent.Stern predicts that the same sort of technology will increasingly be used to filter online news."Sophisticated systems will deliver content based on subjects I've enjoyed in the past," he says. "It's the sort of technology that's a step beyond tags and alerts; it's not about tools I have to pro-actively set up. It's a system that will direct me to a magazine I've never read before because there's a story that I might really like. A system that will see that I regularly read the Autos section and guesses I might also interested in stories on gas prices. It's great for readers: it more efficiently delivers specific content of interest. And it should be great for publications who will reach new readers.
"Nearly everyone I have mentioned this idea to has been skeptical of it. It's not that people don't want their news filtered down to a more manageable portion, most are just worried about what they might be missing if they trust a machine to filter it for them. Even if they only glance over most of the headlines in the New York Times in the morning, they still want to know that they might randomly come across a story about the radio industry in Botswana that could pique their interest. In some ways, finding such articles is part of the reason one reads a newspaper to begin with. Peter Bale, editor of the (London) Times Online, speaking at a conference sponsored by the U.K. Association of Online Publishers (AOP) on May 3rd, summed this fear up rather well."It is important to give people journeys that surprise them," Bale was quoted as saying on the AOP's Web site. "Personalizing a newspaper to death would create a very dull newspaper -- you would lose the ability to discover new things, stuff you didn’t know you wanted to read."
David S. Hirschman (dhirschman@editorandpublisher.com) is online editor at E&P.

Oh, the potential of search. Where will the utility take us? Here's a new product that gives us all a lot of hope that search will be able to eventually consistently bring back stories of high personal value. Check it out. Peter Van

Do You Kebberfegg?

By Mary Ellen Bates, Guest WriterMay 4, 2006

RSS feeds offer a great way to pull in interesting, relevant information—but finding good feeds can be a challenge. A goofy-sounding tool called Kebberfegg offers an elegant solution to that problem.
RSS feeds have been getting a lot more attention lately, and for good reason. For starters, they're one way to keep up with the blogs you read regularly; most blogs offer an RSS feed of either summaries or the full text of each blog entry.
But what's really cool about RSS feeds is that the technology has expanded far beyond blogs. Think about it... RSS feeds just notify you of changes to a web site. That could include not only blogs but company web sites' press release pages, government web sites' news and contract announcement pages, recurring searches in databases as diverse as PubMed and Amazon.com, or what's been added to the Librarians' Index to the Internet.
If you are a serious news junkie, you can monitor headlines through an RSS feed; weather hounds can get RSS feeds of the current weather conditions. And if you want to see the most up-to-date results of a search on MSN, you can re-run the search through an RSS feed.
But how do you identify the RSS feeds of interest? The simplest approach is to look for the little "RSS" or "XML" button on your favorite web sites. There are also some specialized search engines that focus on tracking RSS feeds, such as Feedster's FeedFinder.
But another, really cool, option for finding RSS feeds is a tool called Kebberfegg, developed by web search maven Tara Calishain. Yes, it's kind of a strange name—a pronounceable version of Keyword-Based RSS Feed Generator. Instead of trying to remember where the best RSS feed search tools are and how to use them, Kebberfegg builds RSS feeds around the specific information you're looking and in the types of sources you would probably find most useful.
An example is the best way to explain how Kebberfegg works. Say you're interested in staying up to date on the issue of space tourism (who knows? Maybe some day, it'll be cheap enough for anyone to become an astronaut). Head over to Kebberfegg, type your query, "space tourism", into the search box and then select which of the nine categories you want to use.
For this search, you might want to get RSS feeds from news search engines, scientific and medical sources, and technology sources, so select those categories and click Submit. Or you can select all the categories, and let Kebberfegg create RSS feeds from about 40 different sources, in case you really crave information overload.
The next screen you see will show you the RSS feeds that Kebberfegg has created for you. You can decide which of these sources you want to monitor, then add them to your RSS reader. Note that you can click the XML link to get the URL to the RSS feed, or you can click any of the specialized buttons below each feed listed.
Kebberfegg can be a useful way to get started with a few good RSS feeds, and without your having to remember where to start searching for feeds. Just use it carefully, or you may find yourself subscribing to more feeds than you'll ever be able to read!
Mary Ellen Bates is the principal of Bates Information Services, a research and consulting business based in Boulder, Colorado.

The universal library is an awesome concept. A paradigm shift because all books will be linked together. And the user, the here-to-for reader, will become, in effect, the author because his or her choices of links will create a unique order of content, different from anyone else's. Check it out. Peter Van

From "What Will Happen to Books" A manifesto by Kevin Kelly, The New York Times Magazine, May 14, 2006, p. 45-46.

At the same time, once digitized, books can be unraveled into single pages or be reduced farther, into snippets of a page. These snippets will be remixed into reordered books and virtual bookshelves. Just as the music audience now juggles and reorderes songs into new albums (or "playlists," as they are called in iTunes, the universal library will encourage the creation of virtual "bookshelves" - a collection of texts, some as short as a paragraph, others as long as entire books, that form a library shelf's worth of specialized information. And as with music playlists, once created, these "bookshelves" will be published and swapped in the public commons. . . Once snippets, articles and pages of books become ubiquitous, shuffle-able and transferable, users will earn prestige and perhaps income from curating an excellent collection.

Peter Johnson writes the "Media Mix" column for USA TODAY and has covered media issues for the past 16 years. This exchange was posted in January. He says "we have to . . . move from print to the Internet. . ." I wonder if the opposite is not true: We have to move from the Internet to print. Peter Van

JournalismJobs.com: Are journalists making more of the death of the newspaper industry than is really deserved, given that profit margins at some major chains are higher than many companies in the Fortune 500?

Peter Johnson: No, they're not making too much of it. I'm worried about my own future as are a lot of people. The profit margins are high, but you haven't heard any of these companies say, in light of the changing environment of newspapers, vis a vis the Internet, cable television, etc., we're going to accept a 10 percent margin or an eight percent profit margin. Nor would their shareholders particularly want to do that. So when you have new technology threatening an industry that requires profit margins of 20 percent and above, something's got to give. And that something is ultimately going to be man and woman power. So, yeah, Im very worried about it. Everybody should be worried. Just on a personal basis, my son is a junior in college and I've seen him pick up a newspaper maybe three times in his entire life. He gets everything from the Internet. He hasn't adopted the habit of reading newspapers. I know that young people historically -- at least modern historically -- may not pick up newspapers a lot, but they used to at least get the habit. I don't see younger people getting in the habit of reading a newspaper. But I do see them getting in the habit of getting news from the Internet. We have to figure out how to move from print to the Internet and I don't think newspaper companies are doing such a great job of doing that.

News chosen by the reader coupled with advertising targeted for the reader is the future of newspapers. Peter Van

http://www.MyDailyOnline.com is a website my division of The Charlotte Observer has created that allows readers to put in favorite RSS feeds and receive a "paginated" feed that works seamlessly in a Blackberry.
Check it out.
Tell me what you think. Thanks. Peter Van