Are Open News Systems Credible?
An Investigation Into Perceptions of Participatory and Citizen News
Jonathan Scott
1
, David Millard
1
and Pauline Leonard
2
1
Web and Internet Science, School of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton, Southampton, U.K.
2
Sociology, School of Social Science, University of Southampton, Southampton, U.K.
Keywords:
Social Network, Social Media, Credibility, Openness, Audience Participation, Citizen Journalism, Online
Media.
Abstract:
The growth of the web has led to a shift in the news industry and the emergence of novel news services. Due
to the importance of news media in society it is important to understand how these systems work and how they
are perceived. Previous work has ranked news systems in terms of their openness to user contribution, noting
that the most open systems (such as YouTube) are typically not viewed as news systems at all, despite having
most of the same functional characteristics. In this paper we explore whether credibility is an appropriate
characteristic to explain this perception by presenting the results of a survey of 79 people regarding their
credibility assessments of online news websites. We compare this perceived credibility with the openness of
the systems as identified in previous work. Results show that there is a modest but significant correlation
between the openness of a news system and its credibility, and suggest that credibility is an appropriate if
imperfect explanation of the difference in perception of open and closed news systems.
1 INTRODUCTION
Over the past decade the web has changed the way
that many interact with the news, blurring bound-
aries between production and consumption, and cre-
ating new models of journalism which are described
by terms such as “produsage”, “participatory journal-
ism”, and “civic journalism”. In 2014 it was found
that half of social network users shared news on their
social network accounts, 46% of users discussed news
on these sites, and roughly 10% of users had pub-
lished news videos they made themselves (Mitchell,
2014). Because of the position of the news media in
society it is important to understand how these new
web-based news systems function and how people
perceive and interact with them.
Our previous work has undertaken systematic
analysis of the news processes for a variety of dif-
ferent news systems, and pointed out the confusion
of terms used to describe them (Scott et al., 2015).
This built on previous analyses (particularly that pre-
sented in Domingo et al. 2008), and instead of cate-
gorizing systems into discrete groups, placed them on
a spectrum according to their level of openness. This
produced the spectrum of 32 news systems shown in
Figure 1.
In this work, a difference was identified between
the way closed systems and open systems were per-
ceived (Scott et al., 2015), but this difference was not
elaborate upon. It seems intuitive that the spectrum
ranges from traditional media outlets on the left to
new social media on the right, though this raises the
question as to what measures reflect this difference.
This paper will investigate if this can be explained by
the perceived credibility of the systems.
2 BACKGROUND
Credibility is a measure of how “believable” a piece
of information is (Fogg, 1999), and has been consid-
ered one of the key elements in judging news sys-
tems (Aalberg and Curran, 2011). Common fac-
tors linked to credibility include accuracy, balance,
level of bias, fairness, and honesty (Hellmueller and
Trilling, 2012).
Online news systems bring with them a unique set
of challenges related to assessing credibility. With
the web decreasing the cost of publishing informa-
tion, the gate-keeping role of journalists is being chal-
lenged, making individuals personally responsible for
assessing the credibility of much of the media they
Scott, J., Millard, D. and Leonard, P.
Are Open News Systems Credible? - An Investigation Into Perceptions of Participatory and Citizen News.
In Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies (WEBIST 2016) - Volume 1, pages 263-270
ISBN: 978-989-758-186-1
Copyright
c
2016 by SCITEPRESS Science and Technology Publications, Lda. All rights reserved
263
Figure 1: The landscape of citizen participation. (Scott et al., 2015).
consume. There is evidence to suggest that many
people lack the required digital literacy skills to accu-
rately judge the credibility of online news (e.g. Met-
zger et al., 2003, 2010; Flanagin and Metzger, 2000).
Traditionally, three dimensions of credibility are
heavily studied: message credibility, source credibil-
ity, and media credibility (Metzger et al., 2003).
Message credibility includes specific features of
the message content, including information quality;
language intensity; and message discrepancy (Hell-
mueller and Trilling, 2012). As we are interested in
the relative quality of news websites, rather than mes-
sages within a website, message credibility will not be
relevant to our study. However, it has been shown that
the credibility of one piece of content influences the
way credibility judgements are made for other con-
tent on the same page (Thorson et al., 2010). Though
the more closed systems on the spectrum do have con-
tent from multiple authors on a single page, this is far
more common on the more open systems. This may
impact on the credibility of the systems to the right of
the spectrum.
Source credibility examines the personal charac-
teristics of the message source that influence credibil-
ity judgements, including expertise; trustworthiness;
and sociability (Wathen and Burkell, 2002). On the
web, the influence of source credibility is difficult to
measure as the source of a message is often misat-
tributed: to website owners, sponsors, and even to
web designers (Metzger et al., 2003). Many online
news sites have content from multiple sources and the
impact of each individual source on overall credibility
is difficult to extract.
Schweiger (2000) found that news organisations
with credibility in traditional media may have their
web presence judged more credible than those that
lack this traditional media presence. This can be ex-
plained as a feature of Tseng and Foggs “experienced
credibility” (Tseng and Fogg, 1999) and an assump-
tion that the organisation maintains similar editorial
standards on the web as they do in non-web media.
Sundar and Nass (2001) found that the credibility
of what they called the “selecting source” was also
important when judging source credibility. The se-
lecting source is the entity that chose to share the con-
tent rather than the one that initially collected or cre-
ated it. Sundar and Nass found that users viewed in-
formation selected by other users to be more credible
than information selected by an expert, though Sundar
et al. (2007) found that the credibility of the original
source is still important. Schmierbach and Oeldorf-
Hirsch (2012) found that this effect of the selecting
source increasing the credibility of a piece of content
did not apply to content shared on Twitter, and posited
that this may be due to the Twitter platform’s reputa-
tion as a place for “celebrities and shallow posts”.
Media credibility concerns the credibility of a
communications medium. Traditionally, much me-
dia credibility research has concerned the relative
credibility of television news and newspapers, with
newspapers typically being perceived to be less accu-
rate and more biased than television (Metzger et al.,
2003). Reasons for this include that television can
report live breaking news which proscribes author-
ity and importance (Chang and Lemert, 1968), that
television allows consumers to see what is happening
rather than it being described (Carter and Greenberg,
1965; Gaziano and McGrath, 1986), and because TV
WEBIST 2016 - 12th International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies
264
news typically covers fewer stories than newspapers
they are less likely to make mistakes which reduce
confidence (Wilson and Howard, 1978), or to push
dissonant messages which increase the appearance of
bias (Carter and Greenberg, 1965).
Some of these differences between television
news and newspapers are also present when com-
paring newspapers and online news. Online news
is able to react to ongoing events even quicker than
television news, and with the prevalence of camera-
enabled mobile phones and modern web technolo-
gies, online news systems are able to show videos of
events promptly, sometimes even as they are occur-
ring. These features may lead to websites being per-
ceived as more credible than newspapers, but other
factors will lead to the web having less credibility.
These include the fact that on the web there is much
more information, on many more topics, from many
more people and points of view, than there is in news-
papers. This increases the chances of mistakes being
made and of the medium appearing biased.
This means that depending on the weighting at-
tributed to each factor, the web as a whole may be
seen as less credible, equally credible, or more cred-
ible than newspapers. Research is available to sup-
port each of these positions. For example see Johnson
et al. (2007), Flanagin and Metzger (2000), and John-
son and Kaye (1998) which found online informa-
tion to be more credible than offline, Kiousis (2001)
which found online information to be more credible
than television but less credible than newspapers, and
Schweiger (2000) which found online information to
be less credible than both newspapers and television.
Which type of credibility we ought to focus on
is unclear due to the inconsistent use of terms in
the literature. As mentioned by Hellmueller and
Trilling (2012), The Yale Group Communication Re-
search Program defines “sources” as individual per-
sons, institutions or magazines, whereas McCroskey
and Young (1979) defined this as individual com-
municators. The systems on the spectrum could be
classed as source institutions under the Yale Group
definition but would not fit McCroskey and Young’s
definition.
The systems could also be classed as news me-
dia, with the individual contributors acting as sources.
Rather than analysing the credibility of the web as a
whole we would, for example, investigate the credi-
bility of Twitter as a news medium when compared
to Facebook. For our purposes, we will consider the
technical systems to be news media, and will use me-
dia credibility measures to investigate the differences
on each side of the spectrum.
2.1 Spectrum of Credibility
With previous work having built a spectrum of open-
ness of online news media, we will now investigate
available literature on the credibility of specific on-
line news systems to build an idea of how openness
relates to credibility.
For the more-closed systems, Flanagin and Met-
zger (2007) found that traditional online news sources
ranked higher than other news sources in credibility,
and Melican and Dixon (2008), when investigating
credibility and racism in online news, found that non-
traditional internet news sources were perceived as
less credible than all other sources of news. How-
ever, Kim and Johnson (2009) found that politically-
interested South Koreans viewed independent online
news sites as more credible than traditional media
websites.
In the centre of the spectrum, blogs have been
shown in some cases to be rated as trustworthy,
though primarily by people already skeptical of main-
stream media or regular users of blogs, with non-users
holding lower opinions of blogs’ credibility (Johnson
and Kaye, 2009; Choi et al., 2006), but Schmierbach
and Oeldorf-Hirsch (2012) found that overall, blogs
were less credible than mainstream news.
For the more open systems, Schmierbach and
Oeldorf-Hirsch (2012) compared information pre-
sented via a news organisation’s Twitter feed to in-
formation presented directly by the news organisa-
tion, and found that “Twitter is seen as a less credi-
ble source that may or may not present a less credi-
ble message”. Marchionni (2013) explored the con-
versational features and credibility of news on Twit-
ter, Wikinews, and “collaborative news” (Thorson
and Duffy, 2006). They found that their participants
rated collaborative news as more credible than Twit-
ter, which in turn was more credible than Wikinews.
We can see that there is some evidence that more
closed systems tend to be viewed as credible, and
more open systems tend to lack credibility. However,
there is conflicting data, and due to the inconsistencies
in scales used and the differing definitions of ‘credi-
bility’ used (see Hellmueller and Trilling, 2012), we
are not able to draw any overall conclusions regard-
ing the relationship between openness and credibility
from these results. Instead, we will perform our own
study of the perceived credibility of news systems.
2.2 Measuring Credibility
There have been a number of proposed ways of mea-
suring the perceived credibility of a piece of media.
Hellmueller and Trilling (2012) performed a meta-
Are Open News Systems Credible? - An Investigation Into Perceptions of Participatory and Citizen News
265
(a) Unbiased (b) Fair
(c) Tells the whole story (d) Accurate
(e) Trustworthy
Figure 2: Plots of ratings of Meyer’s factors against position on the openness spectrum.
analysis of credibility research between 1951 and
2011, finding inconsistent use of concepts and a “pro-
liferation of questionable items and scales” dominat-
ing credibility research. They found that of the 85
scales they investigated, only 16 replicated previously
used scales. This makes deciding on the scale to use
in this study difficult.
One scale which was used often, though can not
be considered a standard, is that presented by Meyer
(1988). Meyer validated the twelve factors previously
proposed by Gaziano and McGrath (1986) and pro-
duced five factors which represent credibility. These
have been shown to validly and reliably measure cred-
ibility (West, 1994).
In Hellmueller and Trilling’s meta-analysis,
Meyer’s credibility index was the most commonly
used set of factors, being used 6 times to measure me-
dia credibility (out of 29 in total), 3 times for source
WEBIST 2016 - 12th International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies
266
credibility (out of 21), 2 times for message credibility
(out of 8), and 3 times in other studies (out of 10).
In the absence of an accepted standard, this study
will use the Meyer credibility scales, the factors of
which are: Unbiased/Biased, Fair/Unfair, Tells/Does
not tell the whole story, Accurate/Inaccurate, and
Can/Cannot be trusted.
3 METHODOLOGY
In order to measure the relationship between a news
system’s position on the openness spectrum and the
credibility of the systems, we employed a web-based
study. The survey was spread primarily via social
media and participants were prompted to forward the
study to their contacts. This resulted in 79 respon-
dents (73% male, 27% female, age m=30). All re-
spondents were British, the majority (75%) had grad-
uated university, and 56% of respondents were em-
ployed for wages, whereas 30% were students.
The participants were shown a list of news sys-
tems, from which they selected those they were fa-
miliar with. They were then presented with up to ten
randomly ordered news systems with which they have
familiarity. For each system, the participants were
asked to rate the system against each of Meyer’s fac-
tors, to give the reasons for these ratings, and asked
how often they interact with the system.
All systems from the spectrum presented in Scott
et al. (2015) were available for rating. “The Huffing-
ton Post OnTheBus” was renamed to “OnTheBus (by
The Huffington Post)”, “The Guardian MP Expenses”
was renamed to “MP Expenses Investigation (by The
Guardian)”, “The Guardian Comment Is Free” was
renamed to “Comment Is Free (by The Guardian)”,
and Al Jazeera Your Media” was renamed to “Your
Media (by Al Jazeera)” as it was found during exper-
iment validation that several participants misunder-
stood the question as referring to the parent system
and answered accordingly.
4 RESULTS
Participants submitted ratings for 27 of the 32 systems
presented. For each system this included a rating be-
tween 0 and 4 for each of the five factors, and a rating
between 0 and 4 representing the level of interaction
with the system (0 = never, 4 = very often). Some
participants also provided reasons for their ratings.
Several systems received no ratings at all: OffThe-
Bus (by Huffington Post), Fox uReport, CNN iReport,
MSNBC FirstPerson, and Al Jazeera Your Media. In-
dymedia UK received only a single rating and so no
reliable judgements can be made about its credibil-
ity. These have all been removed from the analysis,
leaving 598 ratings in total, 26 systems rated, and an
average of 23 ratings per system (s = 8.85).
For an overview of the results, Table 1 shows the
spectrum of credibility, based on the average of all
votes received for each system. Figure 2 shows the
relationship between the average rating for each factor
and the system’s position on the openness spectrum.
As the position on the openness spectrum and the
values contributed for each factor are ordinal, we will
use Spearman’s Rank Correlation to determine rela-
tionships between the variables. The correlation be-
tween position on the spectrum and each of the fac-
tors is shown in Table 2. Each correlation is modest
though statistically significant. Table 2 also shows the
correlation when the biggest outlying systems (The
Daily Mail and The Sun, discussed below) are re-
moved.
5 DISCUSSION
Overall, we found that there is a modest correlation
between the openness of a news system and the cred-
ibility of that system. This correlation is significant
for each of the five credibility factors.
The two clear outliers in all measures are The Sun
(a populist British tabloid) and The Daily Mail (a right
wing British tabloid), which despite being very closed
systems, were rated as bottom and second bottom
overall for all credibility measures. These systems
received a number of negative comments including
“media coverage of the lowest grade”, “sensational-
ist racist tripe”, and “right wing propaganda” though
the Daily Mail did receive positive ratings from some
users, and one positive comment of “closer to the
story than some of the others”.
From the comments, the reasons for the low cred-
ibility appear to be either that these outlets are known
for overly sensational stories, or because the ideolog-
ical position of the sources significantly differ from
those of the participants. The fact that some respon-
dents did visit these websites for entertainment de-
spite finding them non-credible lends credence to the
first possibility, but the comments referring to “right
wing propaganda”, and “racist tripe” indicate that for
some it is the political position of the news source that
causes the low reputation.
Though many participants chose not to give rea-
sons for their ratings, the ones who did reveal the in-
consistencies in what people consider to be credible,
Are Open News Systems Credible? - An Investigation Into Perceptions of Participatory and Citizen News
267
Table 1: Spectrum of credibility.
Position Openness
Position
System Unbiased Fair Whole
Story
Accurate Trustworthy
1 2 BBC News 2.54 2.80 2.51 3.03 2.86
2 4 MP Expenses Investigation 2.44 2.78 2.44 2.67 2.78
3 12 Wikileaks 2.63 2.54 2.21 2.96 2.71
4 1 BBC News On Facebook 2.50 2.63 2.25 2.75 2.59
5 6 The Guardian 2.03 2.64 2.42 2.82 2.76
6 21 Wikinews 2.78 2.89 2.44 2.22 2.22
7 14 Slashdot 2.36 2.73 2.09 2.64 2.55
8 20 Flickr 2.35 2.70 2.09 2.52 2.57
9 5 Offical Google Blog 2.09 2.59 2.14 2.82 2.41
10 18 Something Awful Forum 1.27 2.41 2.18 2.45 2.55
11 19 Reddit /r/AMA 1.52 2.35 1.74 2.48 2.13
12 9 The Telegraph 1.55 2.07 2.03 2.21 2.17
13 3 Gawker 2.0 2.29 1.57 2.14 1.71
14 16 Comment Is Free (by The Guardian) 1.04 2.28 1.48 2.28 2.20
15 13 Guido Fawkes 1.25 2.00 1.88 2.13 2.00
16 10 Republic on Facebook 1.42 2.00 1.58 2.11 1.89
17 15 Huffington Post 1.54 1.96 1.68 1.86 1.89
18 11 Sky News on Twitter 1.81 1.77 1.62 1.88 1.81
19 25 Youtube 1.46 1.86 1.60 1.83 1.80
20 24 Twitter 1.47 1.72 1.38 1.72 1.66
21 17 Tumblr 1.04 1.68 1.36 1.72 1.76
22 26 Reddit /r/PoliticalDiscussion 0.88 1.44 1.25 1.88 1.50
23 22 Reddit /r/Politics 0.88 1.63 1.31 1.56 1.25
24 23 Facebook 0.86 1.40 1.09 1.09 1.09
25 7 Daily Mail 0.70 0.87 0.80 0.93 0.83
26 8 The Sun 0.50 0.63 0.46 0.71 0.50
Table 2: Correlations between openness and the five credi-
bility factors.
Factor r
s
p r
s
outliers
removed
p
Fair -.176 df = 598
p <.01
.285 df = 544
p <.01
Unbiased -.220 df = 598
p <.01
.307 df = 544
p <.01
Whole
Story
-.181 df = 598
p <.01
.272 df = 544
p <.01
Accurate -.236 df = 598
p <.01
.349 df = 544
p <.01
Trustworthy -.202 df = 598
p <.01
.315 df = 544
p <.01
and what people consider to be news.
The first thing to note from the comments is that
many participants didn’t consider some of the systems
to be news systems at all. Flickr got comments such as
“Last time I checked, Flickr was a picture upload site,
not a source of information”, “I go to Flickr for pho-
tography, not news reporting”, and “I don’t consider
Flickr a source of news”; Youtube got comments in-
cluding “This is mainly for entertainment, and is not
reliable for more serious news”, and one participant
said of Tumblr that it includes “more porn than news”.
Others felt that the broad platforms couldn’t be
judged as a whole. For example one participant said
of Slashdot “It’s information that is posted by indi-
viduals which have different levels of credibility. So
there’s no way to rate the entire platform as a whole!”,
and of Flickr “a collection of individual’s uploads,
and will reflect those people’s views. I wouldn’t ex-
pect any attempt at impartiality.”. Participants also
believed that browsing habits dictate the credibility of
the media received. For example Youtube received
comments including “It really depends on what you
watch”, and “Pretty much depends on your browsing
habits”. Twitter received the comment “Depends on
who you follow!”.
The comments did re-enforce some existing re-
search, such as the comment claiming of Youtube
that “Seeing things is better than reading about them,
doesn’t contain personal views and perspectives”
(Carter and Greenberg, 1965; Gaziano and McGrath,
1986), though others claimed that Youtube is “a soap-
box for good information and total bull at the same
time”.
When rating the more traditional systems as credi-
ble, many participants alluded to an editorial process.
For example, when rating The Guardian’s Comment
Is Free site, one participant said they “expect that The
Guardian has a system that includes quality control”
and another said that though it contains opinions, it is
WEBIST 2016 - 12th International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies
268
“edited so probably fairer and more trusted than [Red-
dit /r/AMA]”.
The comment regarding the Guardian’s “quality
control” when referring to Comment Is Free provides
evidence that the brand name gives users confidence
in the credibility of a piece of media despite that cred-
ibility coming from a different medium. This also
came through in comments for Sky News on Twitter
(“Sky is a respectable news brand”) and BBC News
on Facebook (“generally trustworthy ... regardless of
medium”, “probably my most trusted brand”, and “of-
ficial and verified account of the BBC”).
Even in the most credible news systems there were
several comments referring to bias in the coverage.
Of the BBC, participants said “Sometimes incomplete
and a bit selective”, “sympathetic to whoever is in
power”, and “information broadcast is down to how
the organisation wants to portray a particular story”,
and The Guardian received comments such as “a pro-
nounced agenda”, “a very heavy ‘Guardian’ slant”,
and “have their own demographic to cater for, which
means that they might be selective as to the facts they
present”.
6 CONCLUSIONS
This paper has provided an overview of credibility re-
search, and presented the results of a survey designed
to judge the credibility of 32 online websites.
We found that overall there is a modest but statis-
tically significant correlation between position on the
spectrum of openness and each of the ve credibility
factors. We found that this correlation exists whether
or not we include the outliers The Daily Mail and The
Sun.
Though there were exceptions, we found that the
data gathered supports the hypothesis that more open
news systems are judged to be less credible than more
closed news systems. Judging from the comments,
the reason for The Sun and The Daily Mail not fol-
lowing this trend is due either to their reputation for
entertainment-heavy sensational stories, or due to the
difference of ideological position between the sys-
tems and the participants.
Other comments showed that there exists dis-
agreement in how the credibility of a broad platform
can be judged, and even what constitutes news. There
were some comments referring to the overall reputa-
tion of the company behind the system (such as The
BBC and The Guardian) rather than looking at the
system itself, and this was often caused by the par-
ticipant holding some trust in the editorial process as-
sociated with that company.
This provides some evidence that the ordering of
the spectrum presented by Scott et al. (2015) is a
meaningful representation of the variety of news sys-
tems, and indicates that credibility is an appropriate
but imperfect explanation of the intuitive difference
between open and closed systems.
Future work should investigate the credibility of
systems that do not fit into the openness spectrum
(such as liveblogs and microblogs), and investigate
where these systems would place on our spectrum of
credibility. Further work is also required to investi-
gate if this relationship exists in non-English language
media.
This analysis has shown that despite growing
numbers of people who share and discuss news on
open news systems, these systems lack the credibil-
ity of traditional news media. Responses indicate that
there is disagreement over whether the more open sys-
tems should be considered to be “news” at all, and in
some cases the editorial process is invoked to explain
why traditional news is the more credible option. It
may be that, to make open news systems more credi-
ble, there needs to be some form of editorial process
added.
In our own future work we will investigate spe-
cific features which affect the perceived credibility of
alternative news outlets. We hope that this work will
contribute to the design of news systems which are
both credible and open to public participation.
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