Web service lets San
Antonio readers pick their news
Local Alerts app gives readers
the option to map out their specific coverage areas.
By Marcelo Duran
Associate
Editor
The San
Antonio Express-News is bringing local news to a whole new level.
The paper in September added
the capability to beam geographically tailored news and information directly to
subscribers’ e-mail addresses, using software from Cambridge, Mass.-based
MetaCarta Inc.
The firm’s Local Alerts
Service for Publishers app lets readers personalize news stories and obtain
information about the community events they most care about, said Julie Weber,
general manager of MySanAntonio.com.
“We use Local Alerts on our
site to encourage people to have information delivered to their inbox based on a
geographical setting,” she said. The Express-News is the first paper to roll out
the software.
Service subscribers can opt to
get their news from any portion of the eight-county San Antonio metropolitan
area. Local Alerts piggybacks on the site’s RSS capabilities to read, extract
and e-mail alerts to subscribers.
“If I wanted to find something
out about one of the bedroom communities, I could easily go in, click on a map
of the geographic area I want information about and I can have alerts sent to me
in the morning and evening on any news that has been uploaded for that area,”
Weber said. “They may live 30 miles away and Local Alerts provides readers the
ability to very easily and quickly find out any news about their geographic
location.”
Map manipulation
Rick Hutton, MetaCarta’s vice
president of content services, said the software enables users to define their
coverage by manipulating a map rather than choosing a neighborhood, town or
city.
“Our technology reads text
somewhat like a human does and extracts those geographic references that a
typical keyword search tool would not recognize,” he said. “It’s not broken down
into neighborhoods. That’s one of the beauties” of the software.
Users can easily modify their
search parameters, Hutton said, requesting alerts for certain types of
classified ads or events such as community fairs.
“We think Local Alerts is
unique in that it allows the newspaper publisher to offer their end users a
means to subscribe to news and information about specific places, where they
work, live or play, or for that matter, where they may be looking at making
investments.”
MySanAntonio.com has tweaked
the service a bit since its initial test run in July, Weber said. During the
evaluation period, some subscribers said they were getting too much information,
causing managers to dial back the amount of content transmitted to users.
Weber said the Express-News is
pleased with the response Local Alerts is receiving from subscribers, but
declined to disclose the number of readers the service is reaching.
“We’ve heard good reports that
the service gives them just enough information about their area,” she said.
MetaCarta maps out niche
MetaCarta Inc. may be new to newspapers, but the online mapping vendor
has plenty of experience working with companies in other industries.
Some of its clients
include the Dept. of Homeland Security, the National Security Agency and
other entities such as the EPA, USDA and Smithsonian Institution, said
Rick Hutton, MetaCarta’s vice president of content services.
MetaCarta launched its
content services branch last year and began its focus on the publishing
industry about six months ago.
Hutton said
MetaCarta’s Local Alerts app is the first in what will be several
applications designed to pull unstructured text — that is, text that
isn’t contained in a database file or within defined fields or records —
and present it with geographic references.
“What we offer to
newspaper publishers is the chance to unlock all of the geographic
information that is buried in their text-based content,” said Hutton.
“Once they can unlock that they can present it to users in a number of
ways.
“The challenge with
online is offering personalization features. Newspapers have had to use
a one-size-fits-all approach in publishing news to everybody without
(giving users the) ability to target it except by asking a user to click
on a section,” he said. “Using software like Local Alerts starts to let
newspapers know who their users are and (also lets them) target the
information that they care about.” |
