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.
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.
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