2022-12-01. The Washington Post has launched an interactive, personalised feature that showcases a shareable summary of a subscriber’s top journalism engagement from the past year.
by Neha Gupta neha.gupta@wan-ifra.org | December 1, 2022
On Wednesday, The Washington Post, launched Newsprint – a personalised and interactive feature that illustrates a subscriber’s most read news topics, favourite journalists and memorable stories from the past year.
This year-end offering builds on The Post’s continued experiments with providing its paying users tailored experiences, based on their news browsing interests and history.
The Post is banking on the “year in news” feature to be a catalyst in strengthening engagement and boosting subscription numbers.
“We expect the feature to reinforce the value we provide our subscribers. Longer-term we want to build on Newsprint and use it as a feature that will help us attract new subscribers and increase brand awareness through social sharing,” said Michael Ribero, Chief Subscriptions Officer at The Washington Post.
A tailored experience
The feature displays a gamut of customised insights from tracking subscribers’ historical trajectory of news interests, reading habits and how they compare to those of other readers.
“Our readers have limited time to consume news,” said Jessica Gilbert, The Post’s Head of Product. “Newsprint, our artificial intelligence-powered experience, shows our subscribers where they want to go — building on the topics they identified and who they read the most, while also helping them discover other stories they might have missed or new journalists to follow.”
The Washington Post recorded nearly 68 million unique visitors across its digital platforms in August 2022, up 7 percent month-on-month.
Experimentation
The Post’s team developed Newsprint iteratively throughout 2022, responding to user research and internal feedback. The brand initially built a “look-back” experience, but pivoted when it learned that readers showed more interest in insights that centred around their reading “personality” and content discovery, rather than revisiting news from the past.
Through this feature, readers can analyse how they’ve fared over the past year and see how the content they consumed the most has been ranked – whether it’s global news, politics, health and wellness or sports. Additionally, subscribers can also take to social media to share this year-end wrap.
Gilbert noted that the brand intends to use Newsprint as a springboard to forge connections and strengthen relationships between journalists and their readers in the future.
Newsprint can be accessed on the brand’s website, mobile application, and is also being sent to a random selection of users via email.
Source: https://wan-ifra.org/2022/12/newsprint-washington-post-launches-interactive-year-in-news-feature/
