The use of algorithmically tailored individual news feeds is increasingly viewed as an important strategy for accommodating consumers’ information needs by legacy media. However, growing personalization of news distribution also raises normative concerns about the societal function of legacy media, in particular when dealing with personalization of traumatic and polarizing content. To extend the discussion of these concerns beyond the current focus on the role of news personalization in Western democracies, this article offers a conceptual assessment of perspectives for adopting personalization for conflict coverage in Ukraine and Russia, where media systems enjoy a lesser degree of press freedom. Using the coverage of the conflict in Eastern Ukraine as a case study, the article offers a conceptual framework for assessing the impact of personalization on the distribution of conflict-related news in a non-Western context.

The crisis in Ukraine was one of the dominant topics in international news coverage of 2014 and the following years. Representing a conflict along the lines of an East-Western confrontation unprecedented since the end of the Cold War, the news reporting in different European countries with different historical backgrounds is an essential research topic. This article presents findings of a content analysis examining coverage of the conflict in the first half of 2014 in newspapers from a diverse set of 13 countries: Albania, Czech Republic, Germany, Latvia, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Serbia, Switzerland and the United Kingdom, as well as Ukraine and Russia. Drawing on prior literature on news values, key events, and news cycles in foreign coverage, this study maps the evolution of the conflict in the course of four key events and identifies specific characteristics of the coverage in different newspapers. The results show that attention for the conflict varies considerably across the countries, which might be traced back to different degrees of geographical and cultural proximity, domestication, and economic exchange, as well as lack of editorial resources especially in Eastern Europe. Russia dominated the news agenda in all newspapers under study with a constant stream of conflict news. Contradicting prior literature, media sought to contextualise the events, and meta-coverage of the media’s role in the crisis emerged as a relevant topic in many countries with a developed media system.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to develop a conceptual framework for assessing what are the possibilities and pitfalls of using algorithmic systems of news personalization – i.e. the tailoring of individualized news feeds based on users’ information preferences – for constructive conflict coverage in the context of peace journalism, a journalistic paradigm calling for more diversified and creative war reporting. Design/methodology/approach The paper provides a critical review of existing research on peace journalism and algorithmic news personalization, and analyzes the intersections between the two concepts. Specifically, it identifies recurring pitfalls of peace journalism based on empirical research on constructive conflict coverage and then introduces a conceptual framework for analyzing to what degree these pitfalls can be mediated – or worsened – through algorithmic system design. Findings The findings suggest that AI-driven distribution technologies can facilitate constructive war reporting, in particular by countering the effects of journalists’ self-censorship and by diversifying conflict coverage. The implementation of these goals, however, depends on multiple system design solutions, thus resonating with current calls for more responsible and value-sensitive algorithmic design in the domain of news media. Additionally, our observations emphasize the importance of developing new algorithmic literacies among journalists both to realize the positive potential of AI for promoting peace and to increase the awareness of possible negative impacts of new systems of content distribution. Originality/value The article particle is the first to provide a comprehensive conceptualization of the impact of new content distribution techniques on constructive conflict coverage in the context of peace journalism. It also offers a novel conceptual framing for assessing the impact of algorithmic news personalization on reporting traumatic and polarizing events, such as wars and violence.

Chatbots are a burgeoning opportunity for news media outlets to disseminate their content in a conversational way, and create an engaging experience around it. Since chatbots are social and interactive technologies, they might be effective tools to lower the threshold of engaging with news content containing opposing views. In an experiment, we test this idea by investigating whether people are more likely to accept a news article containing conflicting views when it is delivered by a chatbot, as compared with the same article on a news website. The results indicated that people agreed more to a counter-attitudinal news article when it was delivered by a news chatbot (compared with the website article). In addition, users also perceived this chatbot article as more credible. The underlying process for this effect was that people attributed human-like characteristics to the chatbot on an implicit level (i.e., perceived mindless anthropomorphism). These results are discussed in the light of their potential contribution to an informed public discourse and a decrease in polarization in our society.

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