Case Study: Personalising mobile news with FAZ.

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Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), a leading German newspaper, wants to meet the changing behaviours of their readers.

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The DNI Fund

The DNI Innovation fund helped FAZ use technology to personalise their audience’s news reading experience.

FAZ readers are consuming news in a new way. It’s the result of a power shift in the relationship between publishers and readers. Audiences aren’t interested in what journalists want them to read – they only want to read what interests them directly. Where news organisations once led the narrative, readers are increasingly crafting their own news experiences.

To help meet their audience needs FAZ reached out to the DNI. The idea; to provide an intelligent way for readers to customise their own individual news feeds on their mobile devices.

FAZ developed and tested three algorithms. Of the three, one stood out. It effectively detected and delivered the kind of personalised content their readers wanted, resulting in a 36% increase in engagement and duration of reading.

FAZ wants to provide a service where readers receive news, based not only on their interests, but on the window of time they have to read and their location. Eventually, FAZ will be able to identify when you’re commuting, and tailor your personalised content to that reading environment. They also want to develop a control panel, so users can de ne how deeply they are tracked, as this is very important to their German audience.

Publishers are cautious, especially when it comes to new tech. Working with the DNI fund has given the team at FAZ the power to “be bold and go for it”. FAZ is working on a digital transformation of their business to meet the evolving needs of the mobile reader. FAZ hopes to be the first to successfully make this change, contributing to what will hopefully be a larger cultural change within the news industry. 



Download the full DNI Innovation Fund report 2016-2017 here to read more about some of our funded projects and key insights from the report.

Working with the DNI fund has given the team at FAZ the power to be bold and go for it.

Thomas Schultz-Homberg
Chief Digital Officer at Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

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