RJI Fellow’s ongoing e-newsletter personalization experiment yields surprising results

Tracy Clark, a 2015-2016 RJI Fellow, believes newspapers with editor-selected email newsletters would have better engagement rates if the content were personalized to each user’s interest. She is in the midst of a pilot study with a large U.S. newspaper, which is simultaneously publishing two email newsletters: one includes editor-selected news content, the other features reader-selected stories. The personalized newsletters are based on Clark’s Reportory platform. This is a progress report.