Personalised newspapers: industry saviour or just another novelty?

Posted by Helena Deards on January 27, 2009 at 4:36 PM

In a world where customisation is key (our clothes, our cars, our TV channels...), why can't we customise our newspapers? In fact we can, Mary Lou Fulton explains. Fulton is Vice President of Audience Development at The Bakersfield Californian, and has discovered a Swiss-German innovation called Personal News, collaboration between SwissPost and Syntops GmbH.

Personal News is currently in its pilot stage, and available in a limited area in Switzerland. However the idea is this; after registering online you select up to seven newspaper sections that interest you (at the moment, available publications include The Washington Post and Austria's The Standard). After that, the relevant newspapers send their PDFs to Syntops, who assimilate the PDF into personalised publications and pass them on to Swiss Post, who has them on your doorstep by 11am. You can even change your newspaper selection up to 7pm the previous night.

Now it seems like a nice idea. As Fulton says, Personal News provides "the serendipity of browsing a newspaper combined with content and advertising that was tailored just for you". She also quotes Vin Crosbie who has written that "customization makes the daily newspaper more relevant to each person's interest and needs. It will make the daily newspaper much, much more valuable."

But - and there is a but - this doesn't provide a solution to one of the biggest reasons that print circulation is in decline: people want news fast and they want it for free. There is no getting away from the fact that this newspaper will still contain stories that were on sites such as Google the day before. Personal News is still a paid service, whilst Google is free. Yes, you can customise your front cover. But you can do the same on Google. In fact, on the Google News page there is a range of options on how you can tailor the page to your personal requirements. You can rearrange the page, receive news exclusively about your local area, add the sections that you want to see and drop those that you don't.

But Fulton has fought back for Personal News; she points out that Google streams stories based on hot topics, and could easily overlook a small story which is causing massive local headlines. She also reasons that Google relies on traditional news outlets to source its stories. Both are valid points. But what goes to say that a local story will be picked up on by one of the newspapers you have selected in your Personal News publication? Although it is true that Personal News is in its pilot phase, the list of 12 available newspapers is far from comprehensive. Furthermore, Google does source its stories from traditional news outlets and doesn't always pick up on blogs - but aren't newspapers the most traditional outlets of them all and even less likely than Google to pick up on obscure blogs?

That isn't to say that Personal News is a bad idea, it is 'a small experiment, but a fascinating one' and on many levels it works. Personalisation ensures that readers are genuinely interested in all the articles before them, whether in print or online. It also, as Fulton points out, provides massive possibilities for audience specific advertising. But whilst personalised online news seems ideal, whether personalised printed publications work in practice is another matter entirely.

Source: Knight Digital Media Center via Ifra