Untitled by Andrew Martin, licence CC0 1.0

ARTICLE: Negative comments undermine news’ credibility

If online news articles are accompanied by negative comments, the readers will find the articles less credible, T Franklin Waddell, of University of Florida, discovered. Waddell conducted an online experiment with 289 Americans, who were exposed to a news story about heroin addiction. In the experiment participants viewed the same news article, but under eight … Continued

Tags: , ,
Published: 11 Dec 2017
Picture: Stop by Sunny Lapin, license CC BY-SA 2.0

ARTICLE: Deciding which news to trust among competing narratives in Ukraine

With contradictory strategic narratives from different parties and governments, propaganda and disinformation, Ukraine’s news media environment has been a difficult one to analyze properly. Joanna Szostek of Royal Holloway, University of London, investigated how Ukrainian people decide where to get their news and what to believe. The author gathered 30 audio-diaries and in-depth interviews with … Continued

Tags: , , , ,
Published: 30 Nov 2017
Untitled by Dean Moriarty, licence CC0 1.0

ARTICLE: Why and how do Singaporeans share news?

How do people choose what news to share – and with whom? Debbie Goh, Richard Ling, Liuyu Huang and Doris Liew, all of Nanyang Technological University, investigated the question by focus group interviews with over 60 Singaporeans of various ages and backgrounds. There are two main types of news-sharing behaviour, the authors found. First, the … Continued

Tags: , ,
Published: 27 Nov 2017
Picture: Clean desk photo by Ramino Mendes, license CC0 1.0, edited and cropped

ARTICLE: Grammar still matters in the digital age

Do audiences care about errors in grammar? Alyssa Appelman, of Northern Kentucky University, and Mike Schmierbach, of the Pennsylvania State University, studied how grammatical errors in news articles affect people reading them. They conducted four experiments in the United States. The first two tested the main effects of grammatical errors on audience perceptions, and two … Continued

Tags: , ,
Published: 23 Nov 2017
Untitled by Rachel Scott, licence CC0 1.0

ARTICLE: User generated content makes news appear less trustworthy

“It appears that journalism’s trustworthiness will more likely suffer than benefit from an increased use of UGC”, write Katherine M. Grosser and Florian Wintterlin, both of University of Münster, with Valerie Hase, of University of Zurich (names not in original order). The authors conducted an online experiment with 487 Germans, exposing the participants to articles … Continued

Tags: , ,
Published: 13 Nov 2017

ARTICLE: Habit keeps older people true to traditional news

When it comes to older persons, traditional news media is still the first chosen source of information. The study by Karin Ljuslinder and Anna Sofia Lundgren, both of Umeå Universitet, analyses the narratives of older people about their news media consumption and their reasons for getting news about the surrounding world from the traditional news press. The article … Continued

Tags: ,
Published: 9 Nov 2017
Picture: Patriotic American Flag by Brandon Day, license CC0 1.0, cropped, colored

PAPER: Some fake news stories persisted longer than others

There were geographic and time-related trends in consumption of fake news prior to the US presidential election. Adam Fourney, Miklos Z. Racz,  Gireeja Ranade, Markus Mobius and Eric Horvitz, all of Microsoft Research, analyzed traffic to websites known for publishing fake news in the months preceding the 2016 presidential election. Researchers used instrumentation data from … Continued

Tags: , , ,
Published: 8 Nov 2017