![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
Abstract
Integrating user-generated content (UGC) has become an everyday practice in online journalism. Previous research suggests this can have both a beneficial and detrimental effect on a recipient’s perception of online journalism’s trustworthiness. We conducted an online experiment that, on the one hand, examined the overall influence of integrating UGC in an online news article compared to leaving it out altogether. On the other hand, we also analyzed how two specific modes of integrating UGC, namely its verification and visualization, influence trustworthiness. Controlling for different news topics, our results show that UGC is not a way to boost journalistic trustworthiness. In general, the journalistic use of UGC has a negative but overall weak impact on recipients’ perceived trustworthiness of a news article. Regarding the mode of integration, the verification of UGC to some extent positively increases trustworthiness, while visual integration has no substantial impact. Overall, the study sheds light on the hitherto somewhat neglected recipients’ perspective on UGC and lays the groundwork for future studies focusing on the reasons behind the uncovered effects of UGC on trustworthiness.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The authors would like to thank Bernd Blöbaum, Miriam Metzger and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.
DISCLOSURE STATEMENT
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. This is not to say that trustworthiness and credibility are the same. While both trustworthiness and credibility are subjective perceptions on the part of the recipient, trustworthiness is conceptualized as the more broad and complex perception in this paper. As will be delineated in the next section, trustworthiness is determined by more antecedents than the three antecedents which credibility refers to (Kohring Citation2004). Credibility can therefore be understood as being antecedent to trustworthiness.
2. The relationship between the antecedents of trustworthiness and trustworthiness itself is not understood as hierarchical. Rather, the perceived trustworthiness of an article is an aggregation of the perceived fulfillment of those antecedents that are relevant for that article.
3. Both an example for an article with visual integration of and verified UGC (group 1) and an example for an article without visual integration of and with non-verified UGC (group 4) can be found in Appendix A (Figures A1 and A2). The first example features the human-interest topic and the second the political topic.
4. While there are a number of antecedents of trustworthiness, our previously developed conceptual model proposes that only five of these antecedents are influenced by UGC. Consequently, only these five antecedents were taken into account for the UGC trustworthiness scale and measured in our experiment. Trustworthiness in the further course of this paper therefore is used to denote the aggregation of these five antecedents.
5. In a few cases, some assumptions on which the ANCOVA is based were not met. This was only rarely the case. Nevertheless, we therefore checked our results against comparison of means based on simple ANOVA analyses. The difference in means as well as significance tests resulted in quite similar results that are displayed in Appendix A (Table A1).
6. Noteworthy differences when excluding these respondents from the sample emerged regarding the correctness of information which then turned non-significant (F(1, 74) = 2.352, p = 0.129) and the currentness of information (F(1, 80) = 3.505, p = 0.065).
![Supercharge Your Next Research Paper: Research and write your next paper with Jenni AI.]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/112447/MPU-L1HU.png"})