The user-tailored newsroom
Newsrooms typically treat publishing as a one-size-fits-all broadcast. What if they tailored their work to a reader's needs and interests?
I thought this was a pretty compelling demo. It’s obviously a proof of concept, but it points to some interesting places journalism could go, and it opens up some new platform questions in the process.
In Burt’s vision, the reader has a profile that expresses their interests, and then the newsroom curates material that is surfaced using that lens. His demo makes that more concrete: here he’s pointed an engine at communications from New York City Mayor Mamdani’s office, and set up personas like “renter in Bushwick” and “parent in Park Slope” that are served a briefing drawn from different information depending on that persona’s particular lens. A parent in Park Slope receives more information about schools in that neighborhood; a retiree in the West Village receives information about their neighborhood but also about services that pertain to them.
You can easily imagine how this might scale up to a newsroom. An engine like this doesn’t have to be limited to source material as in Burt’s demo: it could also be journalistic investigations, interviews, and net-new content created by skilled reporters. In some ways it’s a vision for a better homepage (often among the least-visited parts of a news website) more than a redefinition of journalism itself, except in the sense that surfacing more raw material is welcome.
There are so many interesting questions to consider — many of which dovetail with ideas that have been tackled outside news for years.
For example: if a reader creates a profile, where does that live? Is it on the news website, in which case they have to create a new profile every time they read another site? Or does it live in the browser, so that the user creates their profile once and consents to share it with the various sites they read? People have been working on browser-based identity, and now identity for agentic users, for a long time. It may make sense to apply that work here.
Where should the briefing live? Is it a news website’s homepage, as I’ve surmised above, or is it actually also at the browser or news reader level, drawing not just from one newsroom, but all the newsrooms a user reads? And if it’s the latter, how does the newsroom retain credit, get compensated, and build a first-party relationship with the reader?
I also think there’s an obvious business model here: when a user has created a profile for themselves, it’s just as easy to say that they’re in the market for a car, or that they enjoy single-origin coffee beans. Then you can serve useful sponsored content (like deals) to people who actually want to buy those things, which is both significantly more valuable to an advertiser and more consensual / less adversarial for a reader. It brings newsrooms very close to the Customer Commons ideas that people like Doc Searls have been talking about for many years.
I agree with Burt’s warning here:
“For publishers and journalists who ignore this: Don't be surprised when human readers stop coming to your websites and mobile apps. Not because the journalism is bad, but because it's more efficient to send an AI agent to gather what you've published, sift out what's truly relevant to the user's own context, and reassemble it in whatever format works best for them.”
What might a version of this future that centers reader needs but does it in alignment with the newsroom’s needs and values look like? It’s a good time to start experimenting.
