Keep your eye on personal

If we're honest with ourselves, journalism is taking a long time to get the hang of what a relentlessly personalising web means for us - news providers.

If you were being hyper-critical, you'd say that we - and I mean the business as a whole - are no more than tentative about personalising the way we gather and present news.

We'd better drop that tentativeness pdq - because, if the Yahoo/Google battle is anything to go by, atomising content on the web and personalising access to it, including news, is the only game in town. The web is getting flatter daily - and Yahoo/Google aren't accelerating that for fun; they're doing it because, unlike most news organisations, they get how to make money from the web ... and, anyway, they so dominate the way people use the web (Yahoo News and Google News have over 60 million unique users between them) that they shape behaviour.

We journalists flinch - a bit - at personalisation because it cuts away at so many of the things that have become the staples of our trade: the craft and skill of writing headlines and top lines to grab attention; meeting deadlines; shaping running orders and pages; fashioning stories to appeal to mass audiences, including those who didn't know they'd be interested in that story.

Personalisation - the flattening of knowledge - makes almost all our cherished rites and rituals redundant.

Not happening? Here's the latest offer from Google - in partnership with The New York Times and The Washington Post. It's called Living Stories - it's early days; the application is only in beta. But take a look at the promo video and think what this way of accessing news WILL do to your content. And if you think it won't do anything ... count your money, and then watch Mike Moritz count his.

Meanwhile, those clever people at The New York Times have come up with this way of aggregating the conversation around running news stories. Again, very flat ... and you can personalise the part of the conversation you're interested in. 

Meanwhile, too, Reuters Insider is becoming a reality - a new, paid-for service that allows subscribers to chop up the hundreds of video reports filed each day by Reuters journalists and paste together a single, personalised video that matches their preferences.

In the same way that the web undermined display advertising in favour of targeted selling, it's undermining many of the assumptions we make as journalists about serving mass audiences.

So what would YOUR news output look like if you knew it was going to be part of millions - billions - of personal news portfolios rather than an offer for an imagined 'mass' audience? What would you change? What would stay the same?

Perhaps more importantly, what would that do to the very idea of news? After all, everything is new to someone.