Multistakeholder challenges and opportunities of news recommender systems in newsrooms: a comparative systematic literature review

In today’s digital environment, where audiences seek relevant news across platforms, news recommender systems (NRS) personalize news feeds, presenting both opportunities and challenges for different stakeholders. Despite increasing industry and academic interest in NRS, a comparative perspective across media systems remains absent. This systematic literature review addresses this gap by exploring the opportunities and challenges related to NRS studied across media systems in Western Europe and the United States (U.S.) and highlights current research gaps. Using Hallin and Mancini’s framework and Brüggemann et al.’s clustering for our comparative analysis, as well as Smets et al.’s multistakeholder perspective, we perform an in-depth analysis of 59 publications from Web of Science, Scopus, and Litmaps. Our findings reveal that (a) NRS research is concentrated in the U.S., Netherlands, and Belgium, (b) more interdisciplinary studies are needed to understand the nuanced effects of NRS across media systems, and (c) research on NRS implementation in newsrooms is not a one-size-fits-all process.