Making the news interesting

Abstract

News feeds are an important element of information encoun- tering, feeding our (new) interests but also leading to a state of information overload. Current solutions often select infor- mation similar to the user’s interests. However, long-term interest in one topic, and being highly familiar with that topic, does not necessarily imply an actual interest response will occur when more of the same topic is selected. This study explores how important familiarity is in predicting an interest response. In a study with 30 subjects, interest was manipulated by topical familiarity using novel stimuli froma popular news source. This study shows, within this context, familiarity is moderately important for an interest response: familiarity does indeed make the news interesting, but only to a certain extent. The results set a baseline for predicting interest during information encountering, indicating famil- iarity is important, but not the only influential variable a system should consider when selecting information for users.