Abstract

News recommenders are attracting widespread interest in scholarly work. The current research paradigm, however, holds a narrow (mostly user-centered) perspective on the recommendation task. This makes it difficult to understand that their design is in fact the result of a negotiation process among multiple actors involved, such as editors, business executives, technologists and users. To remedy this, a multi-stakeholder recommendation paradigm has been suggested among recommender systems scholars. This work sets out to explore to what extent this paradigm is applicable to the particular context of news recommenders. We conducted 11 interviews with professionals from three leading media companies in Flanders (Belgium) and find that the development of news recommenders is indeed characterized by a negotiation process among multiple stakeholders. However, our results show that the initial multi-stakeholder framework is not adequately accommodating some of our findings, such as the existence of preconditions, the role of product owners, and the indirect involvement of particular stakeholders. Based on our analysis, we suggest an elaborated framework for multi-stakeholder news recommenders that can contribute to scholarship by providing a multi-sided perspective towards the understanding of news recommenders.

摘要

新闻推荐系统正在引起人们对学术工作的广泛兴趣。然而，当前的研究范式对推荐任务持狭隘（主要以用户为中心）的观点。这让人很难理解，他们的设计实际上是多个相关参与者（例如编辑、业务主管、技术专家和用户）之间协商过程的结果。为了解决这个问题，推荐系统学者提出了一种多利益相关者推荐范式。这项工作旨在探索这种范式在多大程度上适用于新闻推荐的特定背景。我们对来自法兰德斯（比利时）的三个领先媒体公司的专业人士进行了 11 次采访，发现新闻推荐系统的发展确实以多个利益相关者之间的谈判过程为特征。然而，我们的结果表明，最初的多利益相关者框架没有充分适应我们的一些发现，例如先决条件的存在、产品所有者的角色以及特定利益相关者的间接参与。根据我们的分析，我们建议为多方利益相关者新闻推荐者制定一个详尽的框架，该框架可以通过提供对新闻推荐者的理解的多边视角来促进学术研究。