https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7382-3065
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ABSTRACT
Many journalists and industry observers lament that aggregating news underneath sensational headlines will erode credibility and turn off readers. While some scholarly work has studied journalists’ perspectives of this practice, little has been done to understand what audiences think of aggregation and clickbait. This study uses published original and aggregated news articles as stimuli in two online experiments to test readers’ perceptions of news aggregation and clickbait. Aggregation itself has little effect on perceptions of credibility and quality; instead, writing proficiency is more closely linked to these perceptions. Results also suggest clickbait headlines may lower perceptions of credibility and quality.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
ORCID
Logan Molyneux http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7382-3065
Mark Coddington http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6664-6152
Notes
1 Muddiman and Scacco (Citation2019) have found that overheated headlines designed to stoke outrage decrease readers’ intended engagement with a news source and the credibility of that source after reading a headline and article, though those headlines do not withhold information as the ones in these studies and our own do.
2 See the appendix for links to these stories as they were originally published.
3 To preserve the look of the aggregated article and give readers contextual clues to its aggregated-ness, the stimuli included hyperlinks in all the same places as the aggregated articles. These links did not point anywhere, however, preventing participants from leaving the experimental setting by clicking a link in the stimulus.
4 To put it more quantitatively, the original story has longer sentences (19.4 words per sentence compared with 16.2 in the aggregated version), longer paragraphs (37.1 words per paragraph compared with 26.9) and uses slightly longer words, on average (4.69 letters per word compared with 4.65). The original version is longer overall, containing 408 words compared with the aggregated version’s 323.
5 This was the case with Upworthy, which became so synonymous with clickbait headlines that its co-founder apologized for “unleash[ing] a monster” as the company pivoted toward originally produced videos (Bilton Citation2016).