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

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

Tracy Clark’s take on 15 news aggregation apps: Part 3

NewsRepublic NewsRepublic was founded in 2008 by CEO Gilles Raymond. In March 2012 it received a Series A $3 million investment and in October 2013 it received a Series B $6 million VC funding. As explained on an earlier version of their site, “NewsRepublic is a global news app that lets you be your own … Continued

Tracy Clark’s take on 15 news aggregation apps: Part 2

Google Play Newsstand Google has made several attempts at media aggregation, first with Google News in 2002, which was deemed beta for the first three years. It promotes itself as a service that “aggregates real-time news content from news sources around the world, generating 72 editions in 55 languages, and powering Google’s news search. In … 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