Friday February 2nd IViR will host a workshop for professionals from the media and academia who are involved with news personalization. The workshop will provide those who have to lead the way on news personalization the opportunity to exchange ideas, discuss shared problems and solutions, and connect for future collaboration. Karen Yeung, Interdisciplinary Professorial Fellow in Law, Ethics and Informatics at the Birmingham Law School, will give a keynote about algorithmic regulation in the context of the news media.
The workshop is being organized by the PersoNews project. Through interviews with the media, focus groups and surveys of users, and legal research, the PersoNews project has created a more comprehensive overview of the problems, solutions and opportunities presented by news personalisation. The most salient and recent aspects of this research will be presented at this workshop, followed by the possibility for exchange and in-depth discussion of selected issues.
Programme
- 12.00-12.30: welcome and brown bag lunch
- 12.30-13.30: presentation and discussion of the preliminary results of our studies on users and media organizations
- 14.00-14.30: coffee break
- 14.30-15.00: mapping the problem space: what are the most recent and most pressing issues in planning, running and developing personalized news services?
- 15.00-15.45: breakout sessions: based on the preceding discussion, 4 of the following topics will be discussed in separate groups. The discussions will focus on common challenges and potential solutions, the information which is used to deal with them, and beneficial exchanges.
- What is personalization good for and what it is not (and how to measure that)?
- The collection and processing of user data: legal and ethical considerations
- Users’ trust in news and news organizations
- Editorial understanding and control of algorithmic recommender technologies (diversity, relevance, agenda setting, editorial principles, etc.)
- The commercial relevance of personalization (business plans, revenue models, dead ends, and new opportunities)
- Filter bubbles and other threats, and ways to fight them
- News distribution strategies vis-a-vis personalized platforms
- Data-driven personalization and the challenge of equality
- 15.45-16.30: reconvening and reporting on the breakout sessions
- 16.30-17.00: coffee break
- 17.00- 18.00: keynote speech (Karen Yeung), followed by drinks
- 20.00- 22.00: dinner