Approach to “sell” appropriately

At the AI ​​Summit in Bengaluru (India) held in mid-July, Nagaraj Nagabushanam - Vice President of Data and Analytics of The Hindu - India's leading newspaper, talked about how this newspaper uses AI to increase interaction and retain readers.

Accordingly, The Hindu is using AI to help refine and develop content and services to appeal to specific audiences. An example of this is how they personalize some of their newsletters. For example, there is a special article on elections, and a newsletter will be created around that article to explain why the article is important and why readers should read it.

The Hindu is also looking to use AI to tailor content to specific audiences. For example, they have a business newspaper called Business Line. Nagabushanam notes that they have a fair number of chartered accountants as readers, so if needed, they could create a newsletter that is targeted just to that audience.

“We asked CPAs to pick articles they liked, and then we fed that data into a model. The model then figured out that out of the 800-900 odd articles we published in the past week, these are the 25 articles that are most interesting to CPAs,” Nagabushanam said .

According to Chris Petitt, CMO of Zephr, one of the leading digital subscription payment gateway companies, personalization is becoming a key factor for success for newsrooms.

According to the International News Media Association (INMA), a recent study found that 77% of Gen Z (the generation that is attached to mobile phones) believe that it is important for B2C businesses (businesses that operate sales activities towards users) to customize interactions, which can be customized based on personal preferences. Therefore, the task of newsrooms is to use AI to analyze huge data about readers' behavior, preferences, and interests.

From the collected data, AI will step in. “AI has the potential to revolutionize personalization, by using algorithms to analyze large amounts of data and automatically make predictions about the type of content a particular user is likely to be interested in, ” said Petitt.

Looking at the way The Hindu does it, and discussing the digital transformation of journalism in Vietnam, Mr. Dong Manh Hung - Head of the Editorial Secretariat, Permanent Vice President of the VOV Journalists Association said that, from a professional perspective, digital transformation must have a roadmap, be selective, not horizontally drag all the content and form of journalism products in existing types of journalism and "throw" them onto the internet.

Currently, many press agencies put the original published press products such as radio channels, printed newspapers, television channels... onto digital platforms and consider them digital content. This approach is not appropriate. Digital press products need to be edited, staged, and even completely rewritten to suit the digital public, those who need to exploit information in many ways, with many flexible ways, suitable for each individual's approach to information.

“Digital transformation requires professionalism in organizing content production that is suitable for the characteristics of specific media channels and platforms. Each press agency, when transforming digitally, before putting its products on any media platform, needs to understand the characteristics of the audience on that channel, thereby understanding its target audience, choosing products and finding appropriate approaches to “sell” - journalist Dong Manh Hung said.

Personalization is the destination of many Vietnamese press agencies.

Journalist Nguyen Hoang Nhat - Deputy Editor-in-Chief of VietnamPlus Electronic Newspaper said that content personalization is receiving much attention from press agencies. It allows newsrooms to provide content that is deeply relevant to their readers, helping to improve reader satisfaction and loyalty.

As one of the names that quickly grasped the technology trend, VietnamPlus has focused on applying artificial intelligence tools to collect information, analyze, and personalize user data. At the same time, through Chatbot, it interacts with readers, grasps their needs, and offers content solutions suitable for the users it serves, helping them quickly receive the information they want, instead of having to access a huge amount of news in many fields, shortening the time and effort in the process of searching for information for readers.

According to journalist Nguyen Hoang Nhat, VietnamPlus currently collects reader data through technology from Insider. Simply put, a reader interested in sports and technology will not be satisfied if they open a newspaper page and see it filled with political or entertainment news, and vice versa. Therefore, personalization is the goal of many news agencies, through technology to automate news page customization, or through newsletters or news push services (web-push, mobile-push).

“But to be successful with this strategy, the newsroom needs to understand who its readers are, and this is where data comes in. The most advanced personalization strategies require data from users,” said journalist Hoang Nhat.

Also one of the pioneers in applying AI to the field of journalism, journalist Nguyen Viet Hung - Deputy Editor-in-Chief of Thanh Nien Newspaper shared that by launching the Smart Newspaper project, integrating artificial intelligence to read news on the page, Thanh Nien Newspaper has changed the way of receiving user data, both meeting information needs and saving time for readers. Thanks to that, according to the management team, the number of users of the smart newspaper feature has increased to nearly 16,000 accounts, the number of interactions with AI is very high, at times reaching 15,000 requests from users.

Along with that, artificial intelligence technology is also used by many other newsrooms in Vietnam as one of the supporting platforms in the digital transformation era: using virtual hosts for video news, podcast news, applying smart newsroom technology, automatically introducing news to readers based on the user's own behavior... This is a strong transformation for the activities of revolutionary journalism, gradually being proactive, flexible, changing the approach, bringing efficiency to communication activities.

Hoa Giang