European Newspapers’ Digital Transition: New Products and New Audiences

The adaptation of traditional newspapers to new digital media and its interface, far from being a mere technical transformation, has contributed to a gradual change in the media themselves and their audiences. With a sample including the top general information pay newspaper in each of the 28 countries of the European Union, this research has carried out an analysis using 17 indicators divided in 4 categories. The aim is to identify the transformations that the implementation of digital media have brought to the top European newspapers. In general terms, the results show that most dailies have managed to keep their leadership also in online environment. Moreover, an emerging group of global media is growing up, based in preexisting national media. Digital and mobile media have contributed to the appearance of new consumption habits as well, where users read more superficially and sporadically. The audience uses several formats at a time, and digital devices already bring the biggest amount of users to many media. The Internet-created new information windows –search engines, social networks, etc. –are also contributing to the change in professional work routines.

Open Personalization: Involving Third Parties in Improving the User Experience of Websites

Traditional software development captures the user needs during the requirement analysis. The Web makes this endeavour even harder due to the difficulty to determine who these users are. In an attempt to tackle the heterogeneity of the user base, Web Personalization techniques are proposed to guide the users’ experience. In addition, Open Innovation allows organisations to look beyond their internal resources to develop new products or improve existing processes. This thesis sits in between by introducing Open Personalization as a means to incorporate actors other than webmasters in the personalization of web applications. The aim is to provide the technological basis that builds up a trusty environment for webmasters and companion actors to collaborate, i.e. "an architecture of participation". Such architecture very much depends on these actors’ profile. This work tackles three profiles (i.e. software partners, hobby programmers and end users), and proposes three "architectures of participation" tuned for each profile. Each architecture rests on different technologies: a .NET annotation library based on Inversion of Control for software partners, a Modding Interface in JavaScript for hobby programmers, and finally, a domain specific language for end-users. Proof-of-concept implementations are available for the three cases while a quantitative evaluation is conducted for the domain specific language.