Selling News to Audiences – A Qualitative Inquiry into the Emerging Logics of Algorithmic News Personalization in European Quality News Media

Abstract

How do news organizations design and implement algorithmically personalized news services? We conducted 16 in-depth interviews with professionals working in European public service broadcasting and commercial quality news media to answer this question. The news business is undergoing rapid transformations regarding how news production is financed, how news is produced and delivered to audiences and how citizens consume news. In all of these changes algorithmic recommender systems play a role. We focus on news organizations' own personalized news services, and analyze how they define the role of personalization in contributing to the financial success of the organization, in reaching and retaining audiences, and in fulfilling their editorial mission. We interviewed editors, journalists, technologists and business intelligence and publishing professionals to gain a structural understanding of the often conflicting goals of personalization. We found that rather than focusing on increasing short-term user engagement, European quality news media try to use news personalization to increase long-term audience loyalty. In distinction to the "platform logic of personalization", which uses personalization to produce engagement and sell audiences to advertisers, they have developed a "news logic of personalization", which uses personalization to sell news to audiences.

Tourism, technology and ICT: a critical review of affordances and concessions

“…It may be argued that neither has this interest developed over the past seven years. This is also true for social equity, local control, employment quality, or biological diversity preservation, the future ICT-advancing-sustainability propositions heralded by Benckendorff et al (2014). In recalling the outline of this paper, interrelationships of ICT with sustainability beget complexity, and they can contradict or confound the SDGs (G€ ossling, 2017;Nagle & Vidon, 2020).…”

The datafication of Public Service Media

“…The personalization of media interfaces offered on, for example, newspapers' websites not only aims to increase the 'stickiness' of the site to keep visitors browsing longer and thereby exposing them to more commercial ads, but also to generate better data about the user to reduce the media company's dependence on external suppliers of user data (Thurman & Schifferes, 2012, p. 776). The personalization of commercial media interfaces such as newspaper websites is thus not only a question of improving the user experience and attempting to increase the relevance of the content to respond to social media sites' algorithmic principles of content selection, but also an important tool for traditional publishers in their efforts to prevent losing more advertising revenue to social media and tech platforms by keeping the user data in-house (Bodó, 2019;Thurman & Schifferes, 2012). News personalization thus has clear business objectives that reflect the turn towards automated journalism which challenges a classic professional ideal-journalists as the core in democratic deliberative/enlightenment processes (Milosavljević & Vobič, 2019, pp.…”

Placeification: The Transformation of Digital News Spaces into “Places” of Meaning

“…Of course, dominant ideologies and social pressures have long influenced journalistic decision-making, though these issues of control tend to be allayed by scholarship on the flash, flair, and "freedom" of new digital technologies (Gutsche 2017), Dimension 6: Personalization and community-building Given the history of journalism adoptions of technologyat least from the position of corporations, elite journalists, and technologistsplaceification suggests new news spaces will become places through a focus on establishing a connection to both the individual and their sense of community and belonging. It has been argued, for example, that news media adopt news personalization techniques to increase longterm audience loyalty and engagement to a product (Bodo 2019). News platforms personalize the importance of content and sections for a particular use and audience, generating a strong sense of connection and community between the user, the content, and the product.…”