Location factor of recommender systems has been extensively studied in the past decade. However, there is no research thoroughly analyzing location’s role in news recommendation. In this paper, a comprehensive exploration on role of location in news recommendation is presented. First of all, based on analysis of real news datasets, we find that news recommendation differs from spatial item recommendation. Location affects news consumption behaviors of users with two-fold aspects including geographic feature and semantic feature. Regarding geographic feature, location influences news recommendation according to region rather than latitude-longitude level. Furthermore, interesting news topics are also impacted by semantic feature of location. Semantic feature may play a more positive role than geographic feature. The novel findings consistently manifest that, as non-spatial items, news differ from spatial items in that location influences users' selection in terms of different pattern and degree. In summary, geographic and semantic features influence reading preference through mapping locations into special topics. Changing of location topics leads to varying of reading preference. The news datasets in this paper belong to check in data. NewsREEL dataset is from a company, and it is provided by German researcher. The location data in Twitter dataset is also check in data. NetEase news dataset are collected from NetEase news websites, and the type of location data is city or region.