A few pioneering media organizations have started to personalize their user experience. Here is what they did and what the next steps should be.

How would you like to get news personalised to your taste? If this question doesn’t appeal to you, it’s not a surprise. While the concept of offering online content fitting to the person viewing it is nothing new, there is a great level of mistrust in the idea for different reasons.

Ever since social networks became popular, we are all familiar with the idea of seeing what we like most. Or at least the equivalent of what an algorithm thinks we do. Facebook is the most well known provider of such a timeline. And it’s also Facebook that is one of the main reasons people are questioning the content they are seeing: We don’t know whether the information we get is correct, whether it’s complete or if we’re missing out on something. Nor why exactly we are being shown this information - we don’t have control over it.

Compared to neighbouring media industries, the news publishing industry has been relatively reluctant to adopt personalisation in their offering. Understandably, since a lot of industry specific ethical, journalistic and business considerations come into play.

Nonetheless, the way is being paved by companies like The Washington Post, with its Arc Publishing platform, while Adobe, with recent personalisation options in their AEM publishing software, and others following suit.

The main goal of the CPN project is to create innovation in the way content creators can structure content production, distribution and in-depth interaction with audiences. To do this, CPN will realize an innovative Open Virtual Platform. This means that the platform will be 'open' to future third-party integrations and that it is not intended to be a physical system which media companies should install, but as a 'virtual' platform which can be adapted to the needs of media companies by connecting different services together.