1. THE UNIVERSITY OF MEMPHIS
Personalized Social News
A THESIS SUBMITTED FOR PROFESSOR.BREY
MKTG-7546 Marketing in a Digital Environment
BY
YANG SUN
April 2012
Page 1 of 8

2. THE UNIVERSITY OF MEMPHIS
Personalized Social News
1. News consumption shifts from Papery to Personalized Social
As we know, normally, news means content that is published and printed with ink on
paper, distributed by different channels as newspaper or magazine. When personal
computers hit the scene in 1980s, the publisher started to put the content of their
published news online. And lots of news websites were founded in early 2000. People
started to get the news from website from their favorite website, but still standard
format and content.
Through the development of internet, more and more information can be found in the
internet. The information booms, which changes the news consumption behavior.
People are more like to have a filter to help them to select their interested news. The
development of search engineer made this come true. For instance, the “Google
Alerts” can automatically notifies users when new content from news, web, blogs,
video and/or discussion groups matches a set of search terms selected by the user and
stored by the Google Alerts service. Notifications can be sent by email, as a web
feed or displayed on the users iGoogle page. Users can determine the frequency of
checks for new results. Alerts are sent only if new content matches the user-selected
search terms.
In late 2010s, social networking started to prevail. In 2010 about 6 of 10
Internet-connected Americans used a social network, almost double the number in
2008. More and more real social connections are transferred to the internet. The
mobile technology helps people to share information with their friends, parents and
colleagues through Facebook, Twitter, Flicker and Linkedin etc. People can read the
news, picture and video which are shared by their friends. For the news business and
any other that aims to provide relevant information to online communities, the
consequences are profound. Readers will become increasingly dissatisfied with news
sites and apps that show them the same stories everyone else sees. And in the past
year, a revolutionary shift has taken place in the way we consume news. We have
gone from consuming news through traditional media, news websites to having the
news broadcast to us by our social network of friends. The social network of a reader
is quickly becoming their personalized news wire. In fact, 75% of news consumed
online is through shared news from social networking sites or e-mail.
Today, we are on the stage of consuming “Personalized Social News”, Social news is
finding us. Readers who still actively seek out the news want, and almost expect, it to
be personalized and customized to their tastes and interests. News organizations,
Page 2 of 8

3. THE UNIVERSITY OF MEMPHIS
social networks and technology companies are all attempting to respond with sites
and tools that address this changing shift toward a personalized social news stream.
2. Personalized Social News Analysis
2.1 The trend of Personalized Social News leads to the publishing revolution
A. From content and channel focus to content and engagement focus
In the traditional newspaper and magazine industry, a good content is the key to
attract the readers, and a well established distribution channel is the most important
element that forms the final customer penetration rate. But in today’s society, we are
not in the states of lacking information, in contrast, we are embraced by too many
information. Some of them are useful, and some of them are just noise. This leads to a
shift from trust in news organizations to the individual people you know. For instance,
an article written by infamous author, but shared by most of our friends will have a
much more attractions to us compared with an article written by a famous writer.
Now, customer engagement has replaced the distribution channel to be the most
important fact to influence the penetration rate due to the spreading power of social
networking. Thus, we can find that lots of online newspaper and magazine have added
the function to let you comment and easily shared with your social network. Take
Slate (online magazine) for example, now it allows the registered readers subscribe
only to the sections, blogs and writers they’re interested in and allow them to
comments and share with their friends via Facebook and Twitter in order to improve
the customer engagement. But, Slate isn’t yet on mobile, which prohibit the further
engagement with customer. If it goes on mobile, it will be more social and
customizable.
B. The quick reaction is more important than the content itself.
The internet and mobile technology expedite the information communication.
Previously, the news and magazine comes to the users every day, every week, or even
every month. But now, in the trend of social customized magazine, we find users are
active seeking the information, they want their personal magazine every hour, every
minute or even every second. The one who publishes the news first, will always get
the most influence, such as retweet and comments. And people will form their
judgment and likeness based on their own opinion and their social network’s response,
instead of the news or article authors.
A evidence of this influence is Huffington Post (online newspaper) are now using the
Page 3 of 8

4. THE UNIVERSITY OF MEMPHIS
latest technologies offered by both Facebook and Twitter's application programming
interfaces (APIs) to publish automatically and directly to those platforms. They send
updates to customers News Feed by using Facebook's Open Graph protocol,
automatically generating pages for each of the important topics they cover, called Big
News pages. With Twitter, likewise, they have created over one thousand Big News
accounts -- from alerts on Egypt to the latest news on airlines. When news breaks,
we’ll get instant updates.
2.2 Emerging business based on the trend of Personalized Social News
A. Business of Integrated Platform
As news and articles are dispersed on the internet, and our social network is also in
different places, as Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin etc. It is an emerging need of an
integrated platform to combing these together. Just the same as we read newspaper or
magazine, it’s better to have a carrier which can include all the information, instead of
switching among different carriers. These facts encouraged some new firms to focus
on supply an integrated platform for the social customized news.
Now, some companies have started in this area. Flipboard is seemed as the first
integrated platform of a social customized magazine. It combines all the information
you may interested from Facebook, Twitter, Google Reader, Tech News and now
Linkedin etc.
B. Business of Visible News
The area that perhaps needs the most exploration and room for innovation is how to
visually present personalized and social content to readers. Now, many of the social
streams are still quite text-heavy in the design. But we can find few companies such
as Pulse has started to focus on making the content more visually. This indicates a
growing opportunity that new businesses that help the traditional publisher transfer
the text to visually will be coming.
3. Future of Personalized Social News
“This pensonalized social news is a threat to journalism. The development of the web
has broken journalists’ monopoly on news reporting” Said by Jay Rosen, New York
University journalism professor and media critic. This threat, he adds, is the same
threat currently confronting many other professional information gatekeepers in the
networked world. “All kinds of knowledge monopolies—and positions of authority
based on them—are wearing away…[and]…the professionals who have gained
Page 4 of 8

5. THE UNIVERSITY OF MEMPHIS
control of institutions of various kinds—including politics—are not going to have that
kind of control anymore”
However, “this does not mean we do not need journalists...we still need professional
journalists to interpret the world, and explain things to us…But we need form an open
source journalism, the press must become even more interactive…the traditional
newspaper business model has run out of stream” This open source journalism can
been see as lots of media company has started to employ popular Twitter writers.
It’s not that people have lost interest in the news, it’s that they have shifted platforms.
“The shift toward personalization of news is in many ways a response to the problem
of noise, but also a shift from trust in news organizations to the individual people you
know who now often act as curators”, “There’s no such thing as information overload,
there’s only filter failure.”
“The social stream is a means to filter success. Relying on friends and a personal
network to filter the news and point out the best stuff solves that problem identified.”
Rosen said. “Also, the trust that readers place in people they know isn’t the same as
the trust they place in news organizations. But prior to the evolution of the web to its
current social state, people who you know couldn’t be news sources the same way
that big media companies could. But now in a sense they are able to. That’s because
people have an influential voice in the new and social distribution model, and is just
as integrated into the conversation around the news as the news makers themselves
(and many times they are the ones to make the news too).” “People can use the
‘Facebook’ news feed and their Twitter streams as their editors,” Rosen said.
These emerging changes influenced the entire society, as news could be related to
polity, business, journalism and individual. The News organizations that see this shift
are hoping to enlist users as their “editors” by making it easier for them to engage
their content on social platforms. Some companies, like National Public Radio, are
starting to pay attention to their audiences in the social space and are investing
resources to learn about their consumption habits. And some business companies are
started to use social influencer to help them write comments of their products. These
changes and reactions leads to the future question of the credibility.
As Rosen indicates, “though news is increasingly social and user-generated, the
persistent fear is one of credibility and a flaw in measuring a curator’s knowledge on
or interest in a topic. This problem could be improved by enabling users to develop
more targeted news feeds on personalized topics of interest, but also by identifying
specific sources and curators of information as more or less credible than others.”
Rosen describes this as news curators with “levels” of knowledge attributed to them,
Page 5 of 8

6. THE UNIVERSITY OF MEMPHIS
analogous to player levels in game design. For example, if you’re just coming to news
about the “fight over immigration in Arizona” and you have heard mostly noise but
know nothing about it, you’re a level one user, Rosen describes. This would provide
readers with more focused news that is tied to their knowledge, and help filter through
the noise on a specific topic.
Solving such a problem will be crucial as we move toward a more social consumption
norm. One of the possible is to provide a credibility index of the news sources, not
only care about who is sharing the information, but also who is knowledgeable, based
on whether they are eye-witness to an event or are experts on the topic. This might
help consumers better decide what information is credible.
The other problem caused is many corporate find some employees have built their
own social influence through their Facebook or Twitter etc, which is seems as their
personal brands leveraging the brand equity of their employers. These influence can
be a harm to the corporation when the employees are leaving the sompany. On 2011
Christmas Day, The New York Times reported on a lawsuit between a company and
one of its highly influential employees who departed, absconding with his 17000+
Twitter followers in the process. How to reasonable use the individual power of social
news and avoid the potential harm to the corporation is the next research area.
Combining the previous insights, a corporation will build its own advantage in the
trend by enhancing the six dimensions, which are “customer engagement, quick
reaction, integrated platform, visual content, credibility and balancing corporate
influence and tweeter star”
4. Conclusion
The mobile technology development and smartphones prevalence contribute the new
impulse of the personalized social news. In the next five years, it very well could be
that you’ll be more likely to have news find you through the social graph than
consuming news through traditional means of TV, radio and even news websites.
Consumption itself is almost no longer the sole focal point, but instead the focus is
also on the way readers can share, repackage, and customize new to fit into their
personalized social news stream model could then help establish a credibility index
among users as sources, helping consumers better decide what information is
credible.
Page 6 of 8

7. THE UNIVERSITY OF MEMPHIS
REFERENCE
Vadim Lavrusik, Aug 2010, "How News Consumption is Shifting to the Personalized
Social News Stream"
Market Council, November 2011, "DECODING 2012 MEDIA &
MARKETING TRENDS"
Jeff Sonderman, June 2011, “How you can use social machinery to power
personalized news delivery”
Connie Zhang, Aug 2011, “5 News Personalization Tools Bring You Only The Stories
You Want”
Published by Forbes, Dec 2011,“Is Twitter Influence Portable”
Lauren Indvik, Jan 2012, “Slate Gets Personal With Customized Newsfeed”
Palo Alto, Calif. March 2012, “Now With Cover Stories, Flipboard For iPad Has A
Single Place To Quickly Find Interesting News From Friends And Sources”
http://www.slate.com
http://www.huffingtonpost.com
http://flipboard.com
http://www.pulse.me
Interviewer Bio (Jay Rosen)
Jay Rosen, press critic, writer, and New York University journalism
professor .Jay Rosen has been on the journalism faculty at New York University
since 1986; from 1999 to 2005 he served as chair of the Department. He lives in New
Page 7 of 8

8. THE UNIVERSITY OF MEMPHIS
York City. Rosen is the author of PressThink, In April 2007 PressThink recorded its
two millionth visits.
He also blogs at the Huffington Post. In July 2006 he announced the debut
NewAssignment.Net, his experimental site for pro-am, open source reporting projects.
The first one was called Assignment Zero, a collaboration with Wired.com. A second
project was OfftheBus.Net with the Huffington Post.
Rosen is a former member of the Wikipedia Advisory Board. He is currently on the
advisory board of Digital First Media, which runs two newspaper companies: Journal
Register Company and Media News Group. He is also a member of the advisory
board of Post Media, the largest newspaper company in Canada. In November, 2011
he joined the board of The Gazette Company, based in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
In 1994 he was a fellow at the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public
Policy at Harvard University, and in 1990-91 he held a fellowship at the Gannett
Center for Media Studies at Columbia University.
A native of Buffalo, NY, Rosen had a very brief career in journalism at the Buffalo
Courier-Express before beginning graduate study. He has a Ph.D. from NYU in media
studies (1986).
Page 8 of 8