But What Does News Have to Do with Me? – Designing Human-News Interaction with Working-Class Youth through AI-Assisted Sense-Making

News consumption is central to civic participation and democratic discourse. Yet news avoidance is increasing, particularly among younger audiences without higher education. This talk examines how AI-based conversational agents might support more inclusive forms of news engagement by helping users relate civic information to their own everyday lives.
Drawing on qualitative research with young people from non-academic and working-class backgrounds in Bochum, as well as design work with AI-based local news prototypes, the project asks what motivates or discourages engagement with news and how conversational agents can explain why local news matter to users. Jasmin Baake argues that the potential of generative AI for news lies not only in improving access to information, but in supporting sense-making. To develop this argument, she introduces Human–News Interaction as a design perspective for aligning news with users’ lived realities while preserving journalism’s civic function. The talk discusses opportunities and risks of AI-mediated news use for equitable information access, democratic participation, and the design of human-centered news technologies.