The Emergence and Development of News Fact-checking Sites

Abstract

This study analyzes the emergence, development, and stasis of the news fact-checking website through the institutional perspectives of population ecology and institutional logics. The population ecology approach suggests that like other new media forms, fact-checking sites will mimic one another in pursuit of legitimacy, and this will encourage formation of media “populations,” and tendencies to buffer the external environment and stabilize. Over time, these sites will respond more to other sites within the population itself than to changes in the immediate environment. However, the institutional logics approach accommodates conflict and agency, suggesting that entities pursue complex strategies to retain legitimacy when faced with conflicts within the wider institutional environment. The fact-checking site is a product of such a strategy, as it straddles both traditional journalism and digital network logics. Findings show evidence of a budding fact-checking site population, increasing legitimacy, and increased isomorphism. Yet findings also reveal fragmentation and diversity in recent years, suggesting that institutionalization processes are complex and uneven. Findings suggest a need to understand that media entities are shaped by both their exogenous environment and their endogenous “population,” a collective of similar entities. Future research should explore the conditions that lead to one or the other being more consequential.