Personalized News Online: A New Threat to Established Media

Stephen Adler, editor-in-chief of BusinessWeek talks about staying relevant as a news source:

“There is no question people need reliable and accurate business information. I want BusinessWeek to be in a position not to care too much if they want it in print, online or on mobile devices. As long as we’re doing that, we have a purpose in the world.”

Many online are creating their own news sources via personalized news sites:

“…the Personalized Content approach uses a very similar technique to spam detection software. The idea is that everyone has their own pattern of reading. To recognize your pattern, Personalized Content services omit stopwords and extract keywords from the news you read – then use Bayesian Statistical analysis to predict what kind of news you will like or dislike in future.”

The article goes on to overview personalized content sites Reddit, Spotback, Findory, LeapTag and others.

Sites such as these offer something different from a BusinessWeek homepage, but are very compelling. I find myself looking at aggregators more and more, as they are able to pull a variety of sources on a single topic and do a deeper search on the web for specific information.

While some brands fear one large competitor taking their marketshare, an honest look at the web shows that there are many smaller ways that marketshare erodes. This of course has a flip side: adding to information overload.

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