Recently, there has been a marked rise in the amount of online news websites providing editor’s picks and editor’s choices features. As American politics become increasingly polarized, and readers become more self-selecting in their news source choices, this type of editorial direction can help break the vicious cycle of the contemporary echo chamber.
In this paper, Beth Stone and Darrell West follow up their previous paper in which they recommended that news consumers diversify their news sources. They examine the potential of editor’s choice recommendations on news websites, as opposed to the most popular stories feature, to direct the attention of readers to more insightful, well-reported, and diverse news stories. They conclude by discussing challenges with this approach as well as cite recent examples of the “editor’s choice” or “curated editor’s picks” phenomenon on many news websites and in e-newsletters today.
