Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism Digital News Report 2025. Episode 2: AI and personalised news
Jun 23, 2025
Amy Ross Arguedas, a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Reuters Institute, dives into the transformative role of AI in journalism. She discusses how AI is reshaping newsrooms with features like personalized summaries and translations. The conversation reveals varying audience comfort levels across different demographics and regions regarding this personalization. Arguedas also highlights concerns about bias and privacy while emphasizing the need for news organizations to effectively communicate the benefits of AI to bridge the gap with public skepticism.
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Varying Comfort with Personalization
- Comfort with personalization is highest in weather, music, and TV domains but lower for news and lowest for social media feeds.
- Negative experiences and public debates about social media algorithms affect people's comfort with personalized news.
Regional and Age Comfort Differences
- Comfort with personalization is lower in Western and Northern Europe and higher in Latin America, Africa, and Asia.
- Younger people feel more comfortable with social media personalization than older adults, reflecting usage patterns.
Why People Feel Comfortable or Uncomfortable
- People comfortable with news personalization see benefits like relevance, time-saving, less bias than humans, and more diversity.
- Those uncomfortable worry about irrelevance, missing important news, bias, privacy invasiveness, and loss of control.