  This paper proposes a vision and research agenda for the next generation of
news recommender systems (RS), called the table d'hote approach. A table d'hote
(translates as host's table) meal is a sequence of courses that create a
balanced and enjoyable dining experience for a guest. Likewise, we believe news
RS should strive to create a similar experience for the users by satisfying the
news-diet needs of a user. While extant news RS considers criteria such as
diversity and serendipity, and RS bundles have been studied for other contexts
such as tourism, table d'hote goes further by ensuring the recommended articles
satisfy a diverse set of user needs in the right proportions and in a specific
order. In table d'hote, available articles need to be stratified based on the
different ways that news can create value for the reader, building from
theories and empirical research in journalism and user engagement. Using
theories and empirical research from communication on the uses and
gratifications (U&G) consumers derive from media, we define two main strata in
a table d'hote news RS, each with its own substrata: 1) surveillance, which
consists of information the user needs to know, and 2) serendipity, which are
the articles offering unexpected surprises. The diversity of the articles
according to the defined strata and the order of the articles within the list
of recommendations are also two important aspects of the table d'hote in order
to give the users the most effective reading experience. We propose our vision,
link it to the existing concepts in the RS literature, and identify challenges
for future research.
