Customizing News Content for Individuals and Communities

As media organizations embrace the Internet as a viable media, new models of publishing are being investigated. This is due both to the need to find a new economics of customerdriven publishing services and to the emergence of a more demanding and technologically empowered customer. Traditional media channels have not been suitable to efficient customization. News content has been produced for global or national audiences, or smaller geographic communities, like local newspapers. Internet-based customized news services can serve the special needs of individual news customers, as well as small, and often geographically dispersed, communities. Customized forms of information selection and presentation increase the perceived relevance of media content, and provide new and potentially more efficient tools for learning and creation of new knowledge. News content can be customized by focusing customer’s attention to a selected subset of news stories, or by augmenting selected news with related material or illustrative comparisons. Focusing can include filtering, which means showing only the stories that are assumed to be most relevant to the customer, or prioritization, meaning highlighting and emphasizing these stories. The goal of customized news augmentation is to relate the news stories better to what the user already knows. Augmentation combines continuous news streams with automatically selected personal or communal contextual information from heterogeneous sources. Financial news augmentation is an example of a service that combines real-time business news with customized background information, term explanations, and comparisons about numerical data and organizations appearing in the news. For the purposes of customized services, rich and dynamically changing user and community models are gathered about the media customers. User models can consist of special interests, expertise level, previous activity, and community context of any individual user. Community models include information about function, identity, discourse, and shared values of the community. When the news content is matched with customer profiles, a rich description is needed. This calls for deep multi-dimensional metadata to be used as a basis for customization. News providers have multiple options to position themselves in customized media. Internet is driving towards a decentralized and community-oriented mode of publishing, and news organizations are losing their traditional position as the sole gatekeeper of information. Rich customer profiles and high quality metadata about the media content become increasingly valuable, when news organizations are facing new competition as new intermediaries are collecting this necessary information for customization. The media companies have an advantage, if they can innovatively combine the skills of professional journalists with customized services that meet the special needs of individuals and small communities. Acknowledgements The world of electronic media has radically changed during the past five years that I have spent working on this dissertation. The unprecedented surge of interest and rapid deployment of Internetbased communications has been (and continue to be) astonishing. I joined the Ota Online project at the Helsinki University of Technology (HUT) in the beginning of 1994. The futuristic ideas of customized information services of that time are now almost commonplace and widely available on the Internet. This rapid pace of change and innovation has been a challenge from the researcher’s point of view. On the other hand, I cannot think of a better way to participate in a communications revolution. I consider myself extremely fortunate to have been able to work with such a large number of knowledgeable and passionate people. First of all, I would like to thank Professor Reijo “Shosta” Sulonen for keeping me on the right path (and almost in schedule) with his guidance, encouragement, and wisdom. I also want to express my gratitude to my pre-examiners, Professor Nils Enlund, who introduced me to the world of electronic publishing in 1993, and Professor Tapio Varis, for their constructive comments and suggestions for improvement on the thesis manuscript. My former colleagues at the Ota Online project, Mari Korkea-aho, Tuomas Puskala, and Janne Saarela, provided an inspirational working environment when the Web was still very young. More recently, the members of the SmartPush team at HUT, Sami Jokela, Teppo Kurki, and Eerika Savia, have been valuable research collaborators and commentators of my work. Many thanks also to Ari Heinonen from University of Tampere for his thoughtful and clarifying remarks. I want to express my gratitude to Matti Packalén and Jaakko Nieminen for providing a working environment for innovative thinking and intellectual development at Alma Media Corporation. Special warm thanks to Jaakko Nieminen, for your constant encouragement, and for giving me the space and the time that I needed to make this possible. Many of my colleagues at Alma Media have also directly contributed to this work. I would like to thank Marja Heinonen, for enlightening discussions on the difference between engineers and journalists, and for her constructive feedback on my work. Mauri Mattsson, JR Leskinen, Hannu Olkinuora, and Eero Tuomisto have been invaluable sources for ideas and inspiration since the beginning of the Ota Online project. Hannele Vihermaa and Markku Ylinen have taught me a lot about the nature of news and information. I also wish to thank Timo Saari, the other half of “the research twins” at Alma Media, for intellectual stimulation and for shaping my thinking in a fruitful dialogue. I feel very privileged to have studied and worked at the MIT Media Laboratory. I would like to thank Walter Bender, Guillaume Boissière, Pascal Chesnais, Jack Driscoll, Ingeborg Endter, Dan Gruhl, Ken Haase, Martin Hadis, Pattie Maes, Warren Sack, and many others at the lab for an endless source of fresh ideas and for your helpful feedback. I am grateful to all of you for making the Media Lab such a unique and creative environment for working, learning, and occasional softball. I want to thank my parents, my brother, and my grandfather for their support and caring. My children, Aleksi and Laura, have constantly reminded their dad about the important things in life. And finally, my heartfelt thanks to Hanna without your encouragement and patience this work simply would not have been possible. Cambridge, January 25, 2000.