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USA Today Co., partners with Palantir to analyze audience data

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Re: USA Today Co., partners with Palantir to analyze audience data

#61

Post by rootusrootus »

lkbm wrote: post #55
JSR_FDED wrote: post #36

I lived in the US many years ago. USA Today was then already a bit of a joke - always a color pie chart on the front page, ludicrously generic news and sports, and on the last page 1 paragraph of news per state for an entire state (if something newsworthy happened according to the editor I guess). Let’s just say very much not a highbrow paper. I visited the US again last year and got the USA Today in my hotel. I thou…

USA Today also owns a huge number of local papers -- possibly most. The main local papers in the three last places I've lived (Austin TX, South Bend IN, Asheville NC area) were all USA Today Co.-owned. (Used to be called Gannett.) It's not dying. Or, at least, it's doing better than anyone else.

I decided to spot check a few, including places like Portland and Seattle, and it seems like private ownership by a family for the last century is pretty common. And isn't the main paper in Austin the Austin American-Statesman? That's the Hearst family. Though looking a little deeper, they were owned by Gannett until last year.

Re: USA Today Co., partners with Palantir to analyze audience data

#62

Post by cdrnsf »

bluGill wrote: post #29
hannesfur wrote: post #4

With that going on, it's hard to imagine there once was a time where the news paper publishers hat little to no signal on what actually sold news papers. Given that papers were only sold as a bundle of articles and most sold through subscribers, they pretty much had to guess. So they had a rough direction they knew their readers expected and they had some sparse feedback from the "letters to the editor" but you had t…

What happened is there used to be local newspapers with local reporters who at least knew something about the local community. Even if you hated the bias you could at least learn something useful about your community. USA Today as a "my country Today" edition - but they don't have local reporters who understand my community and uncover the important stories. 3/4s of the "local" paper is fluff pieces that go into ever…

They bought the newspaper I worked at in/after college. They downsized significantly, but many folks I worked with over a decade ago now are still there.

Re: USA Today Co., partners with Palantir to analyze audience data

#64

Post by NegativeLatency »

rootusrootus wrote: post #61
lkbm wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

USA Today also owns a huge number of local papers -- possibly most. The main local papers in the three last places I've lived (Austin TX, South Bend IN, Asheville NC area) were all USA Today Co.-owned. (Used to be called Gannett.) It's not dying. Or, at least, it's doing better than anyone else.

I decided to spot check a few, including places like Portland and Seattle, and it seems like private ownership by a family for the last century is pretty common. And isn't the main paper in Austin the Austin American-Statesman? That's the Hearst family. Though looking a little deeper, they were owned by Gannett until last year.

Yes for big cities, but there are very very few independent local papers in less populated areas, for example: https://www.portlandmercury.com/news/with-a-new-media-conglo...

Also the Oregonian (big Portland paper) and the Seattle Times (big Seattle paper) are not locally owned anymore.

Re: USA Today Co., partners with Palantir to analyze audience data

#65

Post by BiraIgnacio »

JSR_FDED wrote: post #36

I lived in the US many years ago. USA Today was then already a bit of a joke - always a color pie chart on the front page, ludicrously generic news and sports, and on the last page 1 paragraph of news per state for an entire state (if something newsworthy happened according to the editor I guess). Let’s just say very much not a highbrow paper. I visited the US again last year and got the USA Today in my hotel. I thou…

Jokes aside, I do honestly wonder what they expect to learn from this kind of analysis.

Re: USA Today Co., partners with Palantir to analyze audience data

#66

Post by ceejayoz »

lkbm wrote: post #55
JSR_FDED wrote: post #36

I lived in the US many years ago. USA Today was then already a bit of a joke - always a color pie chart on the front page, ludicrously generic news and sports, and on the last page 1 paragraph of news per state for an entire state (if something newsworthy happened according to the editor I guess). Let’s just say very much not a highbrow paper. I visited the US again last year and got the USA Today in my hotel. I thou…

USA Today also owns a huge number of local papers -- possibly most. The main local papers in the three last places I've lived (Austin TX, South Bend IN, Asheville NC area) were all USA Today Co.-owned. (Used to be called Gannett.) It's not dying. Or, at least, it's doing better than anyone else.

My local USA Today-owned paper moved from a giant historic building (800 people when I worked there), to a new much smaller office (about 150 people at that point), to announcing they're moving to a coworking space.

They're dying, it's just a slow bleed-out.

Re: USA Today Co., partners with Palantir to analyze audience data

#68

Post by diveandfight »

barumrho wrote: post #19

Setting aside politics and personalities, are Palantir's products any good? At least on the surface, their products seem to have many competitors, so is the product quality actually driving their growth?

I think one thing to keep in mind is that the bar had been subterranean. I've had to work on a few platforms that were either the incumbent Palantir was trying to displace or a competitor trying to beat Palantir. All were not great, but the non-Palantir products would be embarrassing to release to a general enterprise or consumer market.

My observation from the peanut gallery, is that Palantir has been successful because they created a tech-culture incentive system for engineers, whereas legacy contractors (Booz, Deloitte, Accenture, CACI, Boeing, etc.) treated engineers as cost center plus. I think it was literally as simple as: pay engineers Big Tech competitive salary, allow them to collaborate directly with clients to develop solutions, and actively remove Product Managers/Contract Managers from interfering -> megabucks.

To your point, I don't think this is an intrinsic or structural moat. To the extent someone can do these things better or faster than Palantir, I could easily see them beating Palantir in the future.

Re: USA Today Co., partners with Palantir to analyze audience data

#69

Post by diveandfight »

diveandfight wrote: post #68
barumrho wrote: post #19

Setting aside politics and personalities, are Palantir's products any good? At least on the surface, their products seem to have many competitors, so is the product quality actually driving their growth?

I think one thing to keep in mind is that the bar had been subterranean. I've had to work on a few platforms that were either the incumbent Palantir was trying to displace or a competitor trying to beat Palantir. All were not great, but the non-Palantir products would be embarrassing to release to a general enterprise or consumer market. My observation from the peanut gallery, is that Palantir has been successful bec…

I think I missed a connecting piece here, since this is a non-government contract for Palantir.

Since they've been able to do the above, I think they've developed a pretty good skillset at merging disparate data and surfacing it for analytics. Combine that with the fact that their government business is a money-printing machine, you basically end up with an analytics shop that has significant experience at scale and is extremely well capitalized. For a relatively non-tech savvy or uninformed customer, Palantir could look like a pretty attractive option.

Re: USA Today Co., partners with Palantir to analyze audience data

#70

Post by jihadjihad »

JSR_FDED wrote: post #36

I lived in the US many years ago. USA Today was then already a bit of a joke - always a color pie chart on the front page, ludicrously generic news and sports, and on the last page 1 paragraph of news per state for an entire state (if something newsworthy happened according to the editor I guess). Let’s just say very much not a highbrow paper. I visited the US again last year and got the USA Today in my hotel. I thou…

> Let me guess what Palantir will tell them: your audience is dying and/or illiterate. Add cartoons. You’re welcome.

And USA Today will be billed $50M for the privilege.

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