A User-First Framework for Sustaining Local News - Harvard ...

Consider McDonalds’ interest in reaching Atlanta‐area consumers who might be hot
prospects for the restaurants’ breakfast specials. The Atlanta Journal‐Constitution pitched
a local ad agency representing McDonalds on the idea of combining the ajc.com’s
674,000 visitors with the 2.25 million Yahoo! users in the region to create “an
unduplicated reach” of 2.44 million users. Over the course of a year, McDonalds paid
$325,000 to reach those users, with Yahoo! taking $160,000 and the rest going to the
Journal‐Constitution.
Yahoo! decided which users would be presented with the McDonalds ads based on
where they’d been on ajc.com as well as search terms they entered on Yahoo!, their
online behavior on such sites as Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Finance and the sites of other
organizations in the Yahoo! Consortium’s network. Based on that online behavior, the
consortium assigns users to hundreds of demographic buckets that advertisers are able
to target as they choose. Got a hunch that single Moms might be interested in pulling
into the drive‐through for a coffee and Egg McMuffin on the way to work? Just select the
bucket of users that Yahoo! surmises, based on their online behavior and interests, to be
single moms. 104
All of that raises a host of questions about privacy that are certain to stir further
debate as more of this sort of behavioral targeting takes hold, underlining the need for
news organizations to revise their standards of practice with emerging practices in
mind.
National chains like McDonalds aren’t the only advertisers who see value in targeted
groups of users aggregated by local news organizations. Michael Skoler, the pioneering
public radio journalist who’s exploring journalism business models as a Reynolds
Journalism Institute Fellow, tipped me off to an interesting form of special interest
advertising sold by Politico, the national politics site launched by former Washington
Post staffers. 105 By partnering with news organizations around the country, Politico
offers inside‐the‐beltway lobbyists a means of reaching—and perhaps influencing—the
constituents of various members of Congress by placing their ads next to politics stories
on their hometown news sites. 106
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