How can Journalists Promote News Credibility? Effects of Evidences on Trust and Credibility

Abstract

ABSTRACTWith reference to the current debate about a loss of trust in news media, journalism experts in practice and research often demand that journalists should concentrate on enhancing the quality of their reporting and hence focus on facts and evidences. Building on research on trust and credibility, we investigate how the use of different forms of evidences affects the credibility and quality evaluation of news stories, as well as the reading experience from the audience’s perspective. We conducted an online experiment to detect the influence of the presence of scientific sources, statistical information, and their visualization in an online article. Our findings indicate that these evidences increase the perceived credibility. At the same time, we found that adding scientific sources, statistical data and, visualizations to an article does not lessen its reading enjoyment but improves its perceived vividness in the view of news users. Further results and implications are discussed.