We are all experiencing how AI is changing almost everything we interact with. In the media industry, we are truly at the forefront of its transformative power.

Algorithms that once offered broad personalisation toward audience segments or interest clusters are now capable of tailouring information at the level of a single individual. What was once “people like you” is becoming “you, specifically.”

This shift toward hyper-personalisation promises relevance and engagement for news publishers, but it also forces us to ask a deeper question: What happens to a society when its citizens no longer meet on common informational ground?

For more than 100 years, news organisations like Schibsted have worked to inform the public, not only as individuals but as participants of a shared space in society. That shared space, with all of its flaws, relies on the existence of stories we encounter and discuss together. When everyone reads a slightly different news story, filtered through slightly different lenses, we still maintain enough common ground to hold public debate.

Hyper-personalisation challenges that overlap

Hyper-personalisation offers each person a unique stream of information, defined by their behaviours, preferences, location, values, and emotional patterns. We are moving from filtered feeds to “bubbles of one.”

From the reader perspective, there are clear benefits. Readers get stories they care about, in formats they prefer, at the moment they are most receptive.

From a business perspective, personalisation helps strengthen loyalty and promote engagement. It allows media companies to serve millions of customers with a unique intimacy that feels like having a newsroom full of local reporters for each of the bubbles.

For those readers, personalisation can feel like a relief, filtering the noise of the digital world. The never-ending and overwhelming stream of content becomes a curated set of signals — each of them relevant, timely, and aligned with their interests.

But relevance is not the same as truth, and comfort is not the same as connection. The risk is not only that people might receive false information. The deeper risk is that truth becomes fragmented.

If news becomes so personalised that two citizens no longer share a common set of facts, how can they have a meaningful discourse about the world they share together?

Our democracies don’t rely on unanimity but on a basic shared reality. Without such a baseline, public debate becomes a collision between incompatible realities rather than competing ideas.

The challenge is not the technology. Hyper-personalisation will continue to advance, and it can be designed not only to adapt to the readers but to broaden their perspectives. We should work together on designing systems that understand our interest deeply while also exposing us to ideas, stories, and perspectives sitting just outside our usual orbits.

Personalisation should aim to become a bridge rather than a bubble

Personalisation can meet readers where they are and still nudge them toward a wider view of the world. The algorithms we create should not trap individuals but instead guide them gently toward unfamiliar terrain.

Another crucial aspect is transparency. As personalisation advances, users should have a clear understanding of why they are seeing what they see. We cannot expect trust in a system that operates in the dark, which nobody understands.

If readers have the ability to adjust the degree of personalisation they get, their news experience becomes less of a bubble they are trapped in and more of a window they can shape for themselves.

Our newsrooms have a very important role in reinforcing shared facts, particularly in a scenario where the destinations are so fragmented we no longer control our readers’ complete experience. Promoting the truth is actually not incompatible with personalisation. We should aim to build a society where a common understanding can still be achieved while allowing individuals to explore content in different ways.

It matters that the stories we tell remain grounded in reality and are rigorous and independent. Every reader might not consume the same story at the same time, but we must aim to continue to deliver journalism that has accuracy and integrity as its North Star.

Seeing hyper-personalisation as an opportunity

We won’t be able to stop hyper-personalisation, and it is not necessarily a bad thing. As media organisations, we should take this moment as an opportunity to reimagine our relationship with our audiences.

Hyper-personalisation can help us serve people better, respect their time, and meet their needs more effectively. It should also challenge us to reinvent the public space where meaningful discourse can occur — where journalism thrives even when every person receives a slightly different version of it.

The future of news media should not be defined by technology alone. It should be defined by our purpose to build a society where individuals feel deeply understood without losing the
connections that connect us with each other. We should aim to burst those “bubbles of one” and, instead, maintain a solid foundation of a shared reality.

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