Personalized news recommendations have become a standard feature of large news aggregation services, optimizing user engagement through automated content selection. In contrast, legacy news media often approach personalization cautiously, striving to balance technological innovation with core editorial values. As a result, online platforms of traditional news outlets typically combine editorially curated content with algorithmically selected articles - a strategy we term controlled personalization. In this industry article, we evaluate the effectiveness of controlled personalization through an A/B test conducted on the website of a major Norwegian legacy news organization. Our findings indicate that even a modest level of personalization yields substantial benefits. Specifically, we observe that users exposed to personalized content demonstrate higher click-through-rates and reduced navigation effort, suggesting improved discovery of relevant content. Moreover, our analysis reveals that controlled personalization contributes to greater content diversity and catalog coverage and in addition reduces popularity bias. Overall, our results suggest that controlled personalization can successfully align user needs with editorial goals, offering a viable path for legacy media to adopt personalization technologies while upholding journalistic values.

翻译：个性化新闻推荐已成为大型新闻聚合服务的标准功能，通过自动化内容选择优化用户参与度。相比之下，传统新闻媒体通常对个性化持谨慎态度，力求在技术创新与核心编辑价值观之间取得平衡。因此，传统新闻机构的在线平台通常结合编辑策展内容与算法推荐文章——我们将此策略称为"受控个性化"。在本行业论文中，我们通过对一家挪威大型传统新闻机构网站进行的A/B测试，评估了受控个性化的有效性。研究结果表明，即使是适度的个性化水平也能带来显著收益。具体而言，我们观察到接触个性化内容的用户展现出更高的点击率和更低的导航成本，表明相关内容的发现得到改进。此外，我们的分析揭示受控个性化有助于提升内容多样性和目录覆盖率，同时减少流行度偏差。总体而言，我们的研究结果表明，受控个性化能够成功协调用户需求与编辑目标，为传统媒体在维护新闻价值观的同时采用个性化技术提供了可行路径。