Content is king

Tribune Company defines online content with SAS® Text Analytics

Known throughout its history for great journalism and reliably delivering insightful news and information to Americans, Tribune Company is also highly regarded for its imaginative and forward-thinking application of technology. With an industrywide reputation for innovation, the iconic news organization uses text analytics to categorize and deliver highly relevant content to its online readership. 

Customer Success Video

Check out this video to learn more about Tribune Company and its successes with SAS.

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(Runtime: 4 mins, 43 secs)

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Customer Viewpoint
You have questions; our customers have answers. Check out this video Q&A.

Keith DeWeese
Director of Information and Semantics Management

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When it comes to delivering news and information to its online readership, the Tribune Company – one of America's leading multimedia companies, operating businesses in publishing, digital and broadcasting and reaching more than 80 percent of US households – refuses to argue over semantics.

To help online readers find the news and information they want – and keep them coming back for more – the iconic American company is using SAS® Ontology Management and SAS® Enterprise Content Categorization to blaze new trails in serving up the right content, in the right context, to the right audience.

"We use SAS to apply descriptive metadata to our content and define words in relation to our online content," says Keith DeWeese, Director of Information Semantics Management. "When I say define I mean adding context to a word through a logic statement, so that computers can understand what the word actually means, which is then used by our search engines."

"Including our own, we receive content from numerous news agencies and sources for which my group creates descriptive metadata," he continues. "We index all of the content coming in, which, using articles as an example, can be as many as 40,000 items per day. SAS is intuitive and allows us to make associations between words very quickly. We can do things we couldn't before because of the resource commitment that was required."

Choose your words
According to DeWeese, SAS allows his team of linguists and taxonomists to define different words and relate them to each other, such as connecting US President Barack Obama – also referred to as Barack H. Obama or Barack Hussein Obama – to his wife Michelle Obama. And the team can add other attributes or synonyms.

"The technology allows us to set up a dictionary and then transfer the defined words to our content categorization studio, where we then apply the words intelligently as content tags or index hooks," DeWeese explains. "This creates a network of words that binds our content together. It also allows us to discover different concepts within our content.

"For example, when news comes in it's organized at a high level, such as sports. But a sports article might have a great deal of information about the pop singer Madonna, because she might be dating a baseball player, which gives us an article to reuse in our entertainment section. SAS allows us to define, apply and then push out content in the most optimized way."

Driving revenue
Not only does the technology help organize and serve up content to Tribune Company readers, it also helps to drive advertising revenue.

“We measure the success of our SAS applications in a number of ways,” he explains.  “One is through ad targeting and increasing ad revenues. Prior to using SAS it was a challenge to align ads to an article. You need a connection to sell advertisers on certain content. We used to make associations by hand, but you can’t do that when you have tens of thousands of content items daily. You can’t hire enough people to add metadata to all of this content, especially when the news changes and gets updated so quickly – now we can make changes very quickly to our dictionary terms.

"Speed to market is something we account for when we talk about ROI," he continues. "We prefer people to use the search engines on our sites rather than use Google to find our content. SAS enables us to improve our content indexing, which appeals to Google. We have a taxonomy that is part of an overall system that maps to Google AdWords, which leads to revenue. With our page views increasing, we have more opportunities to generate revenue from new segments."

'Round the clock accuracy
In today's 24/7 news cycle, the speed at which information can be delivered is without question a competitive differentiator for organizations like Tribune Company, but it can also create reputational risks.

"The news hits so fast that you have to be changing things very quickly," DeWeese says. "You have to be aware of what you're writing about and the content that you're tagging it to. If an indexing mistake happens, you have to change it very quickly because reputations are at stake.

"One thing I like about SAS is that it's built to standard," he continues. "Due diligence has gone into developing tools that force you to keep the data as clean as possible; the tools give us more control and safeguards. Also, SAS is able to scale in our environment, which is very important. Some vendors we looked at only offered souped-up spreadsheets, but with SAS we have a real workhorse that can take us in so many different directions and push us to the limit."

When all is said and done, says DeWeese, Tribune Company's true goal of optimizing content is to create a better online experience for its readers.

“We are aware that readers want news presented in a certain way and we want them to be the first source they go to,” he concludes. “SAS is giving us the power to know our content, end users and advertisers on so many different levels. All organizations have their own type of brain; we’re evolving ours at Tribune Company through our use of SAS – it’s a significant part of the brain.”

The results illustrated in this article are specific to the particular situations, business models, data input, and computing environments described herein. Each SAS customer’s experience is unique based on business and technical variables and all statements must be considered non-typical. Actual savings, results, and performance characteristics will vary depending on individual customer configurations and conditions. SAS does not guarantee or represent that every customer will achieve similar results. The only warranties for SAS products and services are those that are set forth in the express warranty statements in the written agreement for such products and services. Nothing herein should be construed as constituting an additional warranty. Customers have shared their successes with SAS as part of an agreed-upon contractual exchange or project success summarization following a successful implementation of SAS software. Brand and product names are trademarks of their respective companies.

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