Integrated news publishing - Technology and user experiences: Report of the IMU2 project

Fast networks and multipurpose terminals enable the integrated delivery and use of media content originally targeted at different media. The emerging multiple media portals accessed by a variety of terminals require semi- and fully automatic procedures for managing the content. News services benefit from an integration of news sources that goes deeper than mere listings of links provided by many current Internet portals. This deep integration groups news articles from different sources and media into common and personal categories as well as interlinks the articles. The IMUsystem, developed in this work, automates parts of the news content acquirement and processing work of the portal web master. The IMU active proxy server extracts the metadata from news web sites and also - through video analyses - from television news broadcasts. This makes an automatic classification and linking of related articles and TV clips possible. The deeply integrated material is partitioned into news composites called channels, which can be personalised by the user. The automatically computed event and media calendar allows for a new type of integration of news and information about up-coming events. The news content is further utilised by setting up personalisation procedures for monitoring the business environment. Through the interfaces for PC, TV, WAP and MP3 terminals, the user accesses the same news content at work, at home in the living room and on the move. To balance the automatic procedures with journalistic judgement, we created web tools for human editors to control and override the automatic operations and for creating new content. The community feature enables groups to produce and share their own news and to discuss topics internally. The trial included households with fast network connections through cable modems, ADSL or campus networks. The trial users tested the service over a 6-month period. In addition to the PC users, several households used the service through their TV sets. Some used the service from their WAP phones. The interviews showed that the service was appreciated; one in five users could even imagine using it as their only news source. The interest in the service was fairly steady over the test period; the average use was a 7-minute session once a week, whereas the heavy users viewed it every day. Most users praised the integration of news sources, because it saved time and gave complete information - this was also reflected in the fact that one in four articles was retrieved through the automatically computed links. Only one in five users personalised channels - however personalisation showed clear potential, because the personalised channels were used often and the heavy users created many channels. Even though television set users retrieved more material than the PC users, they thought that the PC service was more convenient. The use of WAP and the environment monitoring was marginal. Television content interested most users, both television news and program schedules. News packages made explicitly for IMU, interested users, but did not launch discussions. Navigating in the TV-IMU application with the remote control was felt to be a bit cumbersome. The users thought that the service would benefit from adding more news publications as sources. Some of these sources - but not all - should provide news in real time. A targeting of the content towards well-defined interest communities would be appealing. With these enhancements, there should be possibilities to bill for the integrated service.