I recently wrote an article for one of my clients about how newspapers are working to keep advertisers interested. Publications are focused on tools to make sure that advertisers can access certain demographics (and therefore keep paying those publications). I’m of the opinion that there’s an equal need to focus on keeping readers interested — and many of the same tools that enable advertisers to target specific groups could be ideal for a publication that wanted to make sure that certain readers saw specific content.

What if you could choose what articles a visitor to your site saw first based on their actual location? Say that your publication covered the entire U.S. but had certain articles that appealed more to readers in different geographic regions. You could keep those readers interested by offering them a front page based on their region. The tool to do so is already out there: a company called Quova can integrate IP geolocation data into websites and online applications. In fact, they’re already doing something similar for the New York Times’ hyperlocal publication, The Local, by displaying ads based on the geographic location of individual readers.

It’s not perfect yet, of course — Quova can always identify country, and is 97.2 percent accurate when it comes to states in the U.S. You can’t show different ads for your address and for an address a mile away. But I have a feeling that’s not so far off.

This sort of technology offers a lot of questions for publications. But it also offers more than a few opportunities. As a writer, I can see a lot of potential — I could sell one publication similar articles but with local interviews for different areas, for instance — what about you?