[rg]

  *"The system knows that women generally favor stories 
  about Brad Pitt, but after some real-time analysis, it 
  can quickly realize that men are far more like to click 
  on a Brad Pitt story that involves a sports movie."*

This is like Michael Frayn's first comic novel "The Tin Men" (1965), about programming a computer to produce an "automated newspaper".

  "But people really preferred an air crash. ... What
  people enjoyed most was about 70 dead, with some 20
  survivors including children rescued after at least
  one night in open boats.  They liked it to be backed
  up with a story about a middle-aged housewife who had
  been booked to fly aboard the plane but who had 
  changed her mind at the last moment."