Search engine working with newspapers to ‘Take back the news’

The aim for many newspapers online is to be a one-stop shop for news, sports, politics, culture entertainment and more; organising all this information in a way that is easy for readers to find what they want, quickly. Trying to encompass everything is nigh on impossible and readers frequently use search engines to go directly to what they are looking for.  In fact around 25% of newspaper web hits come from search engines.

Kelly Dyer-Fry, Director of Multimedia at The Oklahoman realizes “that we [newspapers online] have to be recognizant of the threat [of search engines]. People have choices and we want them to choose us. If we don’t build more of a full service area and a relationship with users, we’ll get left behind”.

Inform.com is making sure this doesn’t happen. It has created a service to enhance newspaper websites, adding value through related articles, either on the same site or across the web. The articles and outside sources drive engagement whilst helping newspapers ‘take back’ the news.

Inform.com, officially launched in July 2006, describes itself as being ‘in the business of organizing, or structuring, massive amounts of unstructured data’. Its vision is to ‘expand the traditional realm of Internet news aggregators and search engines to revolutionize the user experience’. Quite a challenge.

It has chosen approximately 4000 of the most trustworthy English language news sites from around the world and handpicked blogs for their credibility. Through complicated back office configurations, they show only the most relevant articles to the page the reader is looking at. Inform.com asks the newspaper to pick their own ‘universe of news’ from this database of news sites and blogs to avoid any clashes with competitive titles.

Users see a bar on any full article page (as shown), which gives them a choice of where to go next for related information. The articles are split by: relevant pages on the same site, other sites, blogs and/or videos. This enables readers to get all the facts and opinions around one story from various medias keeping the newspaper as the central hub.

The Oklahoman has signed up to the service and told editorsweblog that Inform.com has made users stay on the site longer finding that “they don’t leave the site to go and Google something”. They have seen a 10% page view increase in four months. Dyer-Fry went on to say “I feel like its added value so far. It gives the user a quick glimpse from a big picture perspective, seeing what we’ve covered in the past and related stories plus what others around the web are seeing”.

One delicate subject that surrounds search engines is copyright. Google has been stopped from putting up certain content and images in countries such as Belgium and Norway. So, is inform.com likely to leave itself open to similar copyright issues? “Unlikely” says, Julian Steinberg, VP of Products and Services “we simply take people from one page to another relevant article. Our service benefits all concerned – readers get to see the most relevant pages, the newspaper acts as a central hub which people come back to time and time again (most people return to the page they came from) and the sites we reference generate extra traffic”. In addition, pages are cached for a maximum of one week by which time they are deemed old news.

The service is hosted by inform.com so needs little management from the newspaper. It works on a fee base at the moment but they are looking at a number of different pricing models. As advertising is the major revenue stream from online, Inform.com is also looking to incorporate it into their model of linking by metatags. Whilst that would work centrally, newspapers which have signed up continue to manage their own revenue streams. So far, advertisers at the Oklahoman have not been perturbed by linking to other sites as there is an improved relationship with the reader.

This is a relatively new concept that will need to be in place for several months before the effectiveness can really be determined. The key will be user stickiness - will this model really help to keep newspaper as the central hub with users coming back time and time again? The concept is good and feedback from newspapers so far is incredibly positive. Most of all, it breaches a gap between newspapers and search engines that has become increasingly wide over the past few years.

Sources: Inform.com and The Oklahoman

Quickfacts:
Founded in 2004, by Neal Goldman who sold his last business, Capital IQ, to McGraw for $200m
The Inform.com service launched in July 2006
In December 2006 they have 16 US based clients signed up. They plan to expand into the European market in 2007.
There are currently approx 65 staff in total – 30 of which are a technical team in India

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