Let Me Inform (and Entertain) You: News Recommender Systems to Support Democratic Society

Personalized news recommenders help readers find relevant stories, but also assume an editorial gatekeeping role in shaping public attention. Sanne Vrijenhoek examines the gap between systems optimized mainly for clicks and the journalistic values used by human editors. The talk considers how abstract editorial goals can become measurable technical objectives, reviews progress so far, and identifies interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary challenges in designing news recommendations that support democratic society.