Flipboard Details Massive Expansion of Its Local News Coverage

Curated content platform Flipboard began its local news initiative in 23 metropolitan areas in the U.S. and Canada in January 2020, expanding its availability throughout the year to eventually reach 60 at the end of last October. That total increased dramatically Tuesday. Flipboard’s local news coverage is now available in more than 1,000 cities, towns and regions across the U.S. and Canada, including all of Nielsen’s 210 DMAs (designated market areas). Product manager Brian Gottesman told Adweek the update represents a “quantum leap from what we had before.” People in the U.S. and Canada who update to the latest version of the Flipboard application will be prompted to enable location, after which they will immediately see up to 15 relevant regional and local topics, including Covid-19 news, dining recommendations, political updates, sports highlights and weather forecasts. Gottesman stressed that Flipboard is “very conscious of privacy,” noting that users must opt in, and “ZIP code level is good enough for us,” and adding that the company is not storing the data nor building user profiles. The GPS data Flipboard uses to recommend content is available to advertisers on a per-bid request, but it is anonymized, conforms with OpenRTB standards and is ephemeral. Once users select their cities and topics of interest, Flipboard will automatically add the topics to their Following tab and surface the latest stories from their local news selections to their For You feed. In addition to the 210 Nielsen DMAs, Flipboard’s data quality team also curated local sources based on geographic regions such as the 392 metropolitan statistical areas defined by the Office of Management and Budget and the list of 384 cities with populations of 100,000 and above. Flipboard head of communications Christel van der Boom told Adweek this effort required “a lot of smart thinking on how you can scale this and still provide quality and relevancy.” Any source added to a local topic by the curation team is semantically analyzed and indexed, ensuring that articles from local publishers are distributed across the platform in relevant topic feeds. Flipboard data quality analyst Marty Rose told Adweek a combination of human curation and machine learning is used, saying, “We oversee what the algorithm is spitting out and make adjustments accordingly. We haven’t just left it up to the whims of the system.” He added that the platform taps a variety of sources, including local publications and television stations, as well as relevant content from larger national publications. “There is opportunity for some local publishers or bloggers, if they meet our quality standard,” Rose said. “We looked for local publications, sometimes at the blog level,” Gottesman said. “There may not always be a dedicated publication, but we take the cumulative effect of publications that cover wider areas with stories about that specific town.” Once a new topic is created, relevant content from national sources will automatically be added to it, as well, along with content from blogs, broadcasters, user-generated Flipboard Magazines and Twitter accounts. Flipboard CEO Mike McCue said in a statement, “The recent crisis in Texas has again shown the importance of local news sources, both to provide citizens with reliable information about the situation and where to go for help, as well as to hold leaders accountable. With this endeavor, we want to make local news and information easier to discover and access by bringing together disparate sources of information in one place, organized by location.” Rose echoed that thought, saying, “Sometimes your area becomes the national story. The best source to give information is local publications.”

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Flipboard Details Massive Expansion of Its Local News Coverage

It is now available in some 1,000 cities, towns and regions in the US and Canada, up from 60

David Cohen

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