By Johanna Blakley, Managing Director & Director of Research, Norman Lear Center

The degree of personalization and algorithmic curation used in the delivery of mobile news was a key theme at ONA Mobile, which brought together an international array of digital-savvy journalists in the organization’s first convening outside the U.S. The Lear Center’s Media Impact Project sponsored the conference, in part, because we see mobile fast-becoming the primary platform for news delivery. And, although mobile is still very much in a Wild West phase, where accepted standards are few and far between, the opportunities to measure real impact on people’s lives is simply unprecedented.

As many speakers acknowledged, mobile is “very hard” but the pay-offs are definitely worth the pain. Between the rigors of submitting to Apple, maintaining mobile-responsive websites, reformatting for Snapchat, and navigating the ever-changing rules at Facebook, mobile news providers are constantly challenged to make it pithier and make it relevant. In many ways, I’d argue that mobile pushes journalists to achieve a new level of rigor in reporting.

By Johanna Blakley, Managing Director and Director of Research

The New York Times devoted significant ink this week to The Participant Index (TPI), an effort by Participant Media to quantify and compare the relative social impact of films, TV shows and online video. The article also mentioned the Lear Center's $4.2 million Media Impact Project, which has consulted on the development of TPI.

Participant approached the Lear Center because of its academic expertise in measuring the impact of educational messages embedded in entertainment content. The Center's Hollywood, Health & Society program has partnered with the CDC for the last 14 years to look at how health storylines in popular TV shows affect viewers' knowledge, attitudes and behavior. The survey component of