Picture: Man reading newspaper by Kaboompics, Karolina, license CC0 1.0

ARTICLE: The effect of format and source type on how people select news

A growing competition for audiences and the proliferation of new sources, sometimes less credible, have changed how people read news. Are the concerns over news consumption specific to the medium on which people get their news? ask George D.H. Pearson and Silvia Knobloch-Westerwick of the Ohio State University. The researchers looked for differing patterns of … Continued

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Published: 22 Feb 2018
Picture: Coding Screen by Taras Shypka, license CC0 1.0 and text from the study, license CC BY-NC 4.0

ARTICLE: Human-written, automated and combined news articles were seen equally as credible

As many news organizations are already using computer algorithms to produce journalistic content, questions about how audiences view these stories arise. Anja Wölker and Thomas E. Powell of the University of Amsterdam, did an experiment on how readers perceive different forms of automated journalism in regard to credibility of the message and source. Their online … Continued

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Published: 21 Feb 2018
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ARTICLE: Americans are not that interested in fake news, after all

Few Americans are deeply invested in consuming so-called fake news, Jacob L. Nelson, of Northwestern University, and Harsh Taneja, of University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, write. The authors analysed the browsing data collected from one million Americans before and after the 2016 presidential elections. Nelson and Taneja compared online traffic to established news websites (e.g. New … Continued

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Published: 19 Feb 2018
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ARTICLE: Media coverage of Islam may affect radicalization

The way news cover Islam and Muslims has the potential to increase or decrease the likelihood of Islamist radicalization, an experiment conducted at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich suggests. Katharina Neumann, Florian Arendt and Philip Baugut first interviewed six former extremists (e.g. ISIS members), and then conducted a laboratory experiment with 194 self-identified Muslims … Continued

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Published: 19 Feb 2018
Picture: Al Jazeera Arabic Channel by Enda Nasution, license CC BY-NC 2.0

ARTICLE: Perceptions of audience shaping Al Jazeera’s news

What do journalists imagine their audiences are like, and how does this affect their work? Julian Matthews of the University of Leicester, and Maiya Al Habsi of Al-Bayan College, studied the topic in a non-national and more global context. They examined news professionals’ perceptions of the Arab news audience at Al Jazeera, and how it … Continued

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Published: 16 Feb 2018
Picture: chain link sculpture, Berlin by Tanya Hart, license CC BY-SA 2.0

ARTICLE: Legacy media still have the strongest online audience overlap in the US and UK

A new study by Subhayan Mukerjee and Sandra González-Bailón of the University of Pennsylvania, and Sílvia Majó-Vázquez of the University of Oxford (authors not in original order), created a novel way to find out how people consume news online. Researchers tracked the browsing behaviour of web users and looked at the networks they form while … Continued

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Published: 15 Feb 2018
Untitled by Arek Socha, licence CC0 1.0

PAPER: Recognizing fake news can be effectively crowdsourced

The volume of inaccurate or false information is too much to filter by designated fact-checkers, Gordon Pennycook and David G. Rand, both of Yale University, argue. Could the task, then, be crowdsourced? Pennycook and Rand conducted an online experiment with 1 010 Americans by asking them to rate the trustworthiness of 60 news sources. The … Continued

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Published: 14 Feb 2018
Picture: Tube, hole by Vladimir Kramer, license CC0 1.0

ARTICLE: Only few are likely to find themselves in an echo chamber

“The echo chamber is overstated”, declares a new research article, questioning fears of partisan segregation of people’s news sources. Elizabeth Dubois of the University of Ottawa, and Grant Blank of the University of Oxford, studied being caught in an echo chamber and the relationship between political interest and media diversity. Researchers used data from the … Continued

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Published: 30 Jan 2018
Untitled by Bruno Glätsch, licence CC0 1.0

ARTICLE: Photographs amplify news of danger, but not positive messages

Is a picture really worth a thousand words? Edmund W. J. Lee and Shirley S. Ho, both of Nanyang Technological University, studied the question through an experiment with 445 Singaporean university students. The participants were shown news stories about either nuclear power or nanotechnology. Some of the stories included photographs while others were text-only. Further, … Continued

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Published: 22 Jan 2018