Web Credibility in Online Journalism
A
Senior Thesis Showcase
Whitney Downing
Maryville College Class of 2009
Maryville College Class of 2009
Old media, or mainstream news corporations, have slowly integrated their publications to online format. This transition has greatly broadened possibilities for news corporations to supply information to the general public, but it has also revealed new stumbling blocks for large media corporations. New issues have arisen, such as update speed, public input, and information ownership, which place large corporations in a position to change their mode of operations for an online format.
A Brief History of Internet
Journalism | Update Speed and
Workmanship Issues
Interactivity, Fact-Checking, and Extra
Content | Reporter
Identity
Gatekeeping Theory and Internet Journalism
With the release of third generation net news, traditional journalism has had to go through an adjustment period. According to Poynter Online’s New Media Timeline, the predecessor of the Internet, ARPANET, was formed in 1969 among computers at Stanford University, UCLA, UC Santa Barbara, and University of Utah. News media began to circulate through a BBC-formed technology called Videotex. Ultimately unsuccessful, Videotex did enjoy some years of use in the 1970’s and 80’s, and was the blueprint for later online media circulation. In 1969 the New York Times started its InfoBank, which stored electronic copies of the Times’ archives. This archival system influenced the online news archives that exist on many newspaper sites today (Sheddon 1969, 2008).
In 1990, the first World Wide Web prototype is formed by CERN, the Conseil European Pour La Recherche Nucleaire, after being proposed the year before. About 165 newspapers in the US and Canada have electronic archives, having followed the New York Times’ lead (Sheddon 1990, 2008). By 1993, news organizations were beginning to move their operations online, especially with the release of the Mosaic browser, which revolutionized Internet browsing by displaying graphics as well as text. The first online newspapers were merely copies of the print sources in website format (Poynter Online 1993, 2008). The Pew Research Center reports a tripling of online news consumers from 1996 to 1998, showing a massive increase in audiences interested in getting news online (Pew Research Center 1998). The year 2001 heralded the dot-com stock market crash that brought many sites down and caused others to require payment for access. Still, over 4300 newspapers worldwide had online sites, and the Pew Internet and American Life Project reported that the numbers of Internet users who got their news online vastly increased, especially after the September 11 attacks on the United States (Sheddon 2001, 2008).
Update Speed and Workmanship Issues
The Internet is not a static medium, and the standard model of once-daily news reporting gave way to consistent updates and a race to be first to report a story. The Pew Research Center found in 2004 that journalists have mixed feelings about this “24/7” reporting style. Journalists feel that the race to be first to publish is a cause of shoddy workmanship and badly researched sources. The Pew research paper, which is part of the 2004 State of the News report, says that many journalists feel the reporting race is hurting the industry, with 45% of surveyed journalists believing that online news coverage is full of errors and badly reported (Pew Research Center 2004). Online journalism has clashed with the editorial hierarchy of traditional media. Because it is such a new concept, there are no standards for online reporting, and news editors are often swept up in the race for speedy publication. The Pew Research Center found that while lower-tier news reporters are concerned about the reportedly low quality of news writing online, 57% of the editors and executives at the top of news corporations saw online news as a way of restructuring the reporting methods. These people at the high end of the editorial hierarchy saw the difficulties with the bottom-line pressures of online reporting as a natural evolution of news media (Pew Research Center 2004).
Interactivity, Fact-checking, and Extra Content
The Internet gives journalists the ability to make their publications more interactive through links, message boards, and forums. It allows them to provide links to other content, either to bolster their sources or provide more information on a subject. The Stanford Guidelines for Web Credibility report that a reader’s ability to check facts and sources builds credibility for a website, and ostensibly, this guideline applies to online reporting as well (Fogg 2002). If a journalist reports his or her sources with links to the sources, readers can do their own fact-checking. Paper news sources do not always say where reporters get information. As reporters themselves are disenchanted with the news reporting practices of today’s online journalists, the practice of allowing readers to see news data may improve perceptions of online news credibility from both reader and reporter viewpoints.
The web also allows journalists to provide additional content for stories when there is a length limit for content in the physical publication. Erik P. Bucy calls this increased coverage one of the “non-monetary contributions of Net news to the broader news mission" (Bucy 111). Bucy says that online news can fill holes in coverage that may arise due to space or time reasons, as well as allow reporters the ability to update on stories as they impact the local community, such as an Amber Alert involving a kidnapped local child.
Reporter Identity
Referring back to Donath’s findings, in online news reporting, the believability of the reporter is important (Donath 3). Many parallel online news sites, such as the Knoxville News Sentinel’s www.knoxnews.com, include links to profile pages of their reporters. Based on Donath’s model, a news publication may be seen as more believable by the public when information is provided about its writers. Tom Chester, the Deputy Managing Editor of Mulitimedia for the Knoxville News Sentinel, has a profile page that showcases his recent writings for the paper, offers ways to contact him, and even presents his photograph. There is also a short paragraph on who he is and when he joined the paper. This snapshot of Tom Chester as a writer and member of the staff gives him an identity for readers to refer back to, thus connecting information with a real person rather than a large corporation.
Alex Jones, a radio talkshow host and public information advocate, says that too much information about a reporter can be problematic, however. He likens journalists to jurors in that what is reported by the journalist makes him or her accountable, and echoes Tom Curley when he says that what a reporter does and why is more important than who the reporter is (MacKinnon 16).
The two different schools of thought on author identity seem to clash, but they are really an illustration of how the Internet is changing viewpoints about news reporting. Some people, such as Judith Donath, see the importance of knowing the author’s qualifications in order to discern the probable credibility of that person’s writing. Others, such as Curley and Jones, find the process by which information is found and reported to be more important to the credibility of online news. This situation is one of many that will arise from the transfer of information from the tangible to an online format.
Gatekeeping Theory and Internet Journalism
Traditional journalism functions as a “gatekeeper” of sorts for information. “Gatekeeping theory” is explained by William P. Cassidy as “the idea that there is selectivity in the process of determining what news stories are published or broadcast" (Cassidy). He goes on to explain that there are levels of influence in the process, including the influence of news organizations and professional practices.
One level of influence is the routine that a reporter follows in finding and turning raw information into a story. There are different roles of journalists, says one of Cassidy’s sources, that contribute to how they report information. Some journalists, he says, wish to be neutral, unbiased reporters of things that are verified facts. These journalists tend to avoid stories with potentially unverifiable information or too narrow an interest base. Their main interest is to get well-researched stories out to the public quickly, providing stories that are of interest to many people. This form of journalist is also called an “interpreter" (Cassidy).
The foil to this journalistic personality is the participant journalist, or disseminator. Cassidy identifies this sort of reporter as someone who is not satisfied with the mere facts, and is interested in finding the “real” story behind a claim or problem, especially when it comes to governmental policy. These journalists aim to “help develop the intellectual and cultural interests of the public,” says Cassidy. Most journalists see themselves as a mix of neutral and participatory, Cassidy’s research says (Cassidy).
There is also a third journalistic role that affects gatekeeping in an Internet news setting. This role, the populist mobilizer or adversarial role, personifies reporters who make it their prerogative to be skeptical of all claims, especially ones from government sources. These reporters are also very in tune with their audience members, providing often controversial subjects for political and entertainment-based discussion (Cassidy).
This level of influence, reporter roles, might also affect the public’s view of reporters themselves. Whereas a reporter who dug up controversial subjects in old media may be labeled as a muckraker, these new information seekers are slowly being accepted into the online audience’s consideration as legitimate journalists. However, the numbers that Cassidy found suggest that even the journalists are still a bit wary of classifying themselves as populist mobilizers, with a low amount of online journalists categorizing themselves as adversarial reporters.
The Internet is quick to provide information on any of a number of subjects, which would, in theory, make it easier for journalists to find data. The problem is that everyone else can also view that data. Journalists face the difficulty of finding verified information, as well as pressure to supply the story in a short amount of time for posting.
Another difference in online media versus traditional media that affects the gatekeeping ability of journalists is the editorial hierarchy. Brian S. Brooks and his associates list the editorial hierarchy of traditional journalism, found in Fig. 1.1.
This chart is a very complex hierarchy of editorships. A story must go through this entire process in order to become published in a traditional newspaper. As mentioned earlier, the relatively high speeds at which a story can be released online often means that the story goes through a less rigorous editing process before being released. Cassidy reports that online editors spend about half as much time verifying information in stories as traditional print editors do (Cassidy). This can cause problems with providing verified information, thus potentially affecting credibility of online news stories.
Cassidy also says that the ability to provide users with interactivity and content linking with the Internet is also affecting gatekeeping. Journalists must now also take into account what links they can put with their stories, whether or not they want the public to be able to comment on the story, and which other stories in the online publication should be linked to theirs.
Another newcomer to the gatekeeping process is the user’s ability to be his or her own information gatekeeper. As Curley said in his speech, with the advent of Real Simple Syndication (RSS), users bring in the news that they want to read from different publications without having to leaf through an entire issue. This ability to syndicate information means that users are going to absorb the information that they feel is most pertinent, rather than the information that one news corporation gives them. Cassidy says that these changes in process are part of the switch to Internet format and are unavoidable. He cites a researcher by the name of Deuze, who says that “journalism continually reinvents itself,” and believes that in time, the gatekeeping process will adapt to this new form of reporting.