Tackable may change how you think about online newspapers

Luke Stangel of Tackable at De Anza College

CUPERTINO, CALIF. (November 6, 2010)- With the backing of the San Jose Mercury News and the California Newspaper Partnership, a 27-year-old former De Anza College newspaper editor-in-chief may turn out to be the savior of the U.S. newspaper industry.


Luke Stangel spoke with De Anza College journalism students Monday about his involvement with a new Silicon Valley startup that could change the way newspaper subscribers interact with their favorite newspapers forever. 


Stangel’s company, Tackable Inc., will provide online webtop, Smartphone, and tablet services for major newspapers that will shred your newspaper into 1,000 digestible pieces and serve them back to you from a geolocation perspective.


“When you go to this map, you can look and you can see everything, all the content, that is relevant to your neighborhood,” Stangel said.


Currently newspapers and newspaper websites are organized in a linear fashion so all readers get the same front page and viewpoint. 


Tackable changes the newspaper’s appearance to a view based on reader interest and distance. It brings the most important original elements of the existing newspaper to their attention, which in some cases may be the obituaries. This hypertargeting allows readers to focus on the stories that affect them the most.


This is unlike a headline service like Yahoo news. “It captures all the information from the newspaper,” said Stangel. “Classifieds, coupons, everything that’s relevant to your area is going to be in one spot.” “You will have the whole paper in your pocket.”


Stangel and his colleagues believes that newspapers will be able to charge 20 to 30 percent more for advertising with this system because of the increase in forecasted traffic. 


Stangel said they are now engaged in equity stake partnership discussions with MediaNews Group of Denver, Colo., which owns The California Newspapers Partnership,  publishers of the San Jose Mercury News and more than 80 other newspapers in the state of California.