As online social media platforms continue to proliferate, users are faced with an overwhelming amount of information, making it challenging to filter and locate relevant information. While personalized recommendation algorithms have been developed to help, most existing models primarily rely on user behavior observations such as viewing history, often overlooking the intricate connection between the reading content and the user’s prior knowledge and interest. This disconnect can consequently lead to a paucity of diverse and personalized recommendations. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to tackle the multifaceted issue of recommendation. We introduce the Dual-Observation-based approach for the Recommendation (DOR) system, a novel model leveraging dual observation mechanisms integrated into a deep neural network. Our approach is designed to identify both the core theme of an article and the user’s unique engagement with the article, considering the user’s belief network, i.e., a reflection of their personal interests and biases. Extensive experiments have been conducted using real-world datasets, in which the DOR model was compared against a number of state-of-the-art baselines. The experimental results explicitly demonstrate the reliability and effectiveness of the DOR model, highlighting its superior performance in news recommendation tasks.