Who won? The personalization email newsletter study results are in

• Editor’s note: Tracy Clark is the founder of the technology platform Reportory and was a 2015-2016 RJI Fellow. She worked with the Austin (Texas) American-Statesman as part of her fellowship project.  In a head-to-head experiment, e-newsletter content chosen by the reader outperformed e-newsletter content selected by an editor. Over the past year I partnered with … Continued

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.

Wide world of content

I have to admit that I’m a bit of a hypocrite. One of the reasons I built my online news aggregation platform Reportory two years ago was my great frustration in paying for multiple, nonpersonalized (neither the content nor the ads) wasteful print newspapers and news magazines. I cancelled all of my print subscriptions and … Continued

The Apple News app is not living up to its hype

The Apple News app launched with much hype on September 15. I’ll always remember that date because the app’s launch was a major determinant for me to pivot Reportory, my news customization platform, from a consumer-facing service to a license play for publishers. The Apple News app hadn’t launched when I first profiled 15 other … Continued

Undergoing the great entrepreneurial pivot

Many entrepreneurs find themselves pivoting at some point during their entrepreneurial journey. Even some of the leading tech companies today pivoted in their early days: Instagram initially was a check-in service called Burbn; Facebook was FaceMash, asking users to rate which person was hotter; and YouTube was a video dating site. Whether pivoting sales strategy, … Continued

RJI announces its 2015-2016 class of fellows

From exploring journalistic opportunities for wearable technology to helping smaller community newspapers provide digital services for advertisers, the ninth fellowship class of the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute continues RJI’s commitment to nurturing and strengthening journalism’s service to citizens and their communities. This year’s residential, nonresidential and institutional fellowships were chosen from among 225 applicants … Continued