Persona-experiments

http://www.papertopersona.org

This page is updated to accompany the white paper, "From Paper to Persona." It's a representative list of experiments or services related to news curation or personalization or the interesection between social networks and news. This list was created in April 2011 by Bill Densmore, consulting fellow to the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute. If an entry is out of date or if you're aware of a new experiment please email densmore@rjionline.org. The order of listing is not significant.

---

• Quora – A social network built around the idea of posing and answer questions.
• Intersect – Created by a former Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, allows participants to create chains of stories that are sorted and rooted in place and time.

· Trove, News.me, Zite and FlipBoard – Four recent launches seeking to personalize news delivery by asking our preferences and leveraging our “social map” – datamining (with our permission) our Twitter, Facebook and RSS feeds.

• Wikipedia – Still evolving the idea of user-generated news – even though it set out ot be an encyclopedia, wikipedia often is faster than any news organization at creating richly linked and contextual pages about breaking news events.
• The New York Times/NPR – Each leading the way in becoming platform-agnostic news organizations – one a broadcast non-profit, the other a commercial newspaper. In another 10 years, will they be fully competitive?
• Newstrust – The first attempt to invite the public find and rate the quality and trustworthiness of news and news sources.
• Newsy – Real-time analysis of multiple news sources assembled in a review-like format to a multimedia platform.
• Huffington Post/AOL – Dismissed as an “aggregator” by main stream media, Huffington Post now claims hundreds of editors and reporters and millions of pageviews. Is is sustainable without the work of legacy media and will it pay for that work?
• Google – Same question as HuffPost – will it pay for the news, because the millions both HuffPost and Google are already paying The Associated Press and other wire-service sources?
• Ongo – A joint-venture of the New York Times Co., Gannett Co. Inc. and the Washington Post Co., the first baby step by major news organizations to collaborate on a “news portal” in the iPad environment.
• Next Issue Media – A joint venture of the first largest U.S. consumer magazine publishers is intended to develop a common presentation platform for tablet devices.
• Itunes Store – With over 200 million credit-card accounts logged in, arguable the largest marketplace for digital information on the planet. Will Apple be able to keep growing, or face objections over its penchant to keep control of the user experience?
• Google OnePass – A competitor to the iTunes Store, an effort to help publishers charge for content.
• Besides Apple and Google, Clickshare Service Corp. and Journalism Online (acquired by R.R. Donnelly & Sons) are among companies offering solutions to news organizations who want to be paid online for news-related content.
• Spot.us – A non-profit San Francisco-based startup testing the idea that readers will voluntarily contribute to a pool supporting pitches for specific news stories. Like U.S. public radio fund-raising, Spot.us challenges the assumption that subscriptions or micropayments are the only way besides advertising to support quality journalism.