News recommendation has become an essential way to help readers discover interesting stories. While a growing line of research has focused on modeling reading preferences for news recommendation, they neglect the instability of reader consumption behaviors, i.e., consumption behaviors of readers may be influenced by other factors in addition to user interests, which degrades the recommendation effectiveness of existing methods. In this article, we propose a probabilistic generative model, BoRe, where user interests and crowd effects are used to adapt to the instability of reader consumption behaviors, and reading sequences are utilized to adapt user interests evolving over time. Further, the extreme sparsity problem in the domain of news severely hinders accurately modeling user interests and reading sequences, which discounts BoRe’s ability to adapt to the instability. Accordingly, we leverage domain-specific features to model user interests in the situation of extreme sparsity. Meanwhile, we consider groups of users instead of individuals to capture reading sequences. Besides, we study how to reduce the computation to allow online application. Extensive experiments have been conducted to evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of BoRe on real-world datasets. The experimental results show the superiority of BoRe, compared with the state-of-the-art competing methods.