| Popis: |
Today many media users are confronted with an overflow of audiovisual content and information on different platforms, making them feel overwhelmed. For end users it has become difficult to determine which news is relevant and trustworthy, as a lot of news circulating online can be categorized as ‘fake news’ and ‘misinformation’. Furthermore, not every news consumer has the same level of knowledge on a topic, leading to a need for diversification. On the other hand, there is the danger of the so-called “filter bubble” which might lead to a biased and unnuanced view on important societal topics (Pariser, 2011). Traditional news organizations have been a trusted news source for media users over the past decades. In today’s society where information has increased exponentially, there is an important role for these established media companies to offer relevant and trustworthy news to their audiences. The covid-19 health crisis has stressed this need even more. To address these challenges, the European Horizon 2020 project CPN (Content Personalisation Network) aims to offer media consumers more relevant news, in the right format and at the right time. To achieve this aim, a personalized news application was developed with content from its media partners VRT (Belgium), Dias (Cyprus) and Deutsche Welle (Germany). The application offers personalized news in three languages: English (DW), Greek (Dias) and Dutch (VRT). This news application has been developed together with all relevant stakeholders via a user-centered design approach in a living lab setting. The application has been iteratively developed and tested in three pilot rounds. In the last round we applied an open pilot with over 4.000 participants divided over the three pilot countries (Belgium, Germany, Cyprus). The final pilot took place February-March 2020. In this contribution we discuss the end user evaluation of the CPN-app, focusing on specific elements such as the user acceptance towards news personalisation, the issue of fear of missing out (FOMO),sustainability of the notion of filter bubble from an end user perspective and whether there is an increased level of the feeling of being informed after using the CPN application. The discussed results are based on a combination of quantitative data (logging and survey data) and qualitative data (interviews with test-users). The first two pilot rounds already provided us with relevant insights related to news personalisation. In pilot 3 we tested the CPN recommender on a larger scale. |
