STRATEGIC: The opportunities left for news organizations Re: Big Data in action -- thoughts?

[Bill Densmore]

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Martin Langeveld and I exchanged links in a thread over the last couple of
days which began with a reading of RJI Pivot Point participant Alan
Mutter's latest:

"Big Data is a big deal for newspapers"
http://newsosaur.blogspot.com/2012/08/big-data-is-big-deal-for-newspapers.html

Martin then linked to a New York Times story today:
"Supermarkets try customizing prices for shoppers"
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/10/business/supermarkets-try-customizing-prices-for-shoppers.html

And Martin said: "It illustrates that merchants don't need the newspaper
as middleman anymore."

Is Martin right? Perhaps yes. But the experience of The Day in New London,
Conn., and Mutter's post, suggests at least two ripe opportunities for
news organizations:

1) Use their core expertise -- content generation and curation -- to help people access, find and use information trustworthy that matters to them, especially information too valuable to be accessed for free and get a cut of the subscription and curation process revenues. Become part of a content- and user-sharing network protocol that manages the value exchange. See for example:

http://newshare.com/wiki/index.php/Rji-pivot-project-new-network-approach

2) Help users to manage their personas. I need help deciding what I tell my supermarket, my insurance provider, my doctor, my news provider, and N-number of retailers -- about me. I'd like a place that can help me manage all that and keep it all up to date so I don't have to have one-off relationships with hundreds of providers. I don't want to have to have a loyalty card for every commercial relationship I have. I want to have one place to manage all my "personas" -- and negotiate value around them.

That's the Infovalet opportunity. How can news organizations leap into that opportunity now, while they still have millions of loyal, trusting, paying users as a base?

News organizations have to move beyond an undifferentiated audience -- they need to learn and store knowledge about each of their users -- in an open collaboration with those users. Supermarkets now have their own audiences -- their loyalty card holders -- and they can manage them directly. But news organizations can start to parse it, understand their audiences, and manage loyalty-affinity programs on behalf of their subscribers and users, selectively sharing the right information about the user at the right time to the right merchant -- and do it all with the user's interest in mind as their agent against the marketing world.

I think.

This is more of what Martin Langeveld wrote to me about the New York Times story:

> In a nutshell: Supermarkets are testing: based on what the supermarket
> knows about you, your behavior, your preferences, you get discounts off
> the posted prices. It's basically custom-tailoring a marketing program
> for each individual shopper.
>
> While newspapers are still trying to translate traditional media
> directly to some kind of digital shape (iCircular), the supermarket
> world is thinking not just, Why do we still need newspapers to deliver
> digital circulars, but: Why does it have to look like a circular at
> all?Why can't we tailor the digital equivalent of a circular
> individually for every shopper, and adjust it on the fly as she's
> walking up and down the aisles?
>
> And why can't every other kind of merchant learn to do the same thing, from
> big box stores to Ma and Pa?

So my answer to Martin: Why can't every newspaper learn to do the same thing, in behalf of their users and for the benefit of lots of ma and pa merchants?

RELATED LINKS:
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-- bill

+----------------------------------------------------------------------+
Bill Densmore
Consulting Fellow / Reynolds Journalism Institute
Journalism That Mattters / The Media Giraffe Project
c/o Densmore Associates
Williamstown Mass. USA
mobile: 617-448-6600
wpden...@gmail.com