Disclosing Diverse Perspectives of News Articles for Navigating between Online Journalism Content

Today, exposure to journalistic online content is predominantly controlled by news recommender systems, which often suggest content that matches user’s interests or is selected according to non-transparent recommendation criteria. To circumvent resulting trade-offs like polarisation or fragmentation whilst ensuring user’s autonomy, we explore how different perspectives within online news can be disclosed instead for guiding navigation. To do so, we developed an interactive prototype that displays article titles in correspondence to their argumentative orientation. In order to investigate how the usage of our novel navigation structure impacts the choice of news articles and user experience, we conducted an exploratory user study assessing the impact of the design parameters chosen. Implications are drawn from the study results and the development of the interactive prototype for the exposure to diversity in the context of navigating news content online.