Following a month off after my unexpected liberation from Gigaom, I started this week as Director of Media & Technology Partnerships at SmartNews. I feel very fortunate to have discovered this company at a time when I believe I have a lot to offer.
First, some recent coverage,
- News Aggregator SmartNews Shows Rapid Growth, Adds Local Channels
- Hot News App SmartNews Crosses 10 Million Downloads And Launches Globally
- SmartNews, the minimalist news app that’s a hit in Japan, sets its sights on the U.S.
While researching the company, I was delighted to learn they had hired Rich Jaroslovsky. Rich and I crossed paths a few times when I was working at Dow Jones as he was getting wsj.com off the ground. We both have a fascination with technology’s impact on media and I shared his mission to bring The Wall Street Journal online. We had since gone our separate ways but I always admired his love and respect for good journalism as a writer, editor, and business guy.
Rich explained to me that SmartNews thinks of itself as a machine learning company with a news front-end which is right in the nexus of what makes me tick. The co-founders, Ken Suzuki and Kaisei Hamamoto, are super-sharp engineers who see news discovery as an interesting problem to solve and hugely important for society to get right. To give you a sense for how they think, as they look for real estate for their San Francisco office, Ken and Kaisei each created their own interactive maps showing the locations of high tech startups and compared notes to determine that the area of 2nd and Howard was the ideal spot to focus their search.
I made my pitch (excerpted below) and here I am!
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Two of the hardest challenges for the publishing industry are distribution and advertising. When publishers moved online, they had to reinvent their traditional distribution channels and navigate a new landscape.
Initially it was the portals such as Yahoo and AOL that would curate the best of the web. Advertising was also sold this way, manually curated and matched to broad channels of interest maintained by the portals.
As technology improved, search engines such as Google automated discovery and matching a reader’s interests to a publisher’s content. Advertising was automated and optimized via keyword matching and auction systems to extract maximum value. Distributed widgets allowed publishers to embed advertising into their sites and a combination of publisher tags and indexing that allowed them to take advantage of an ad network’s inventory.
Social media platforms have recently taken over as a source of traffic for publishers and content snippets shared via these networks represent the fastest growing segment of inbound readers for a publisher.
A common thread to success across all these channels is attractive representation of a publisher’s content within each distribution channel. Whether it’s meta-data, SEO, or “social media optimization,” each new distribution channel has spawned a new method of representing your content to the service which is doing the crawling and aggregation.
For a new distribution channel both the crawling and aggregation algorithms are key to successful presentation of content and relevant advertising to the reader.
Technology has enabled effortless distribution of news so the looming challenge is not so much the distribution of content but more its discovery and presentation. Social media burnout and personalization algorithms are still very basic and often push more and more similar content to the reader resulting in a “filter bubble” which shows the reader only what they want to see or worse, what they already know.
Working with publishers to find them new sources of readership and readers to teach them something they didn’t know is an important goal that aligns with my interests. The fact that the team is based in Japan, a culture with a strong culture of news readership, is attractive to me as I am a big fan of introducing Japan to the rest of the world.
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