“Most online users receive ‘news’ from various sources, and given such a multiplicity of sources, it is likely that online users may not remember which source supplied which piece of information.” Even though this article is from 1998 it is just as true today as it was then or even more so. From the article by S. Shyan Sundar titled, “Effect of Source Attribution on Perception of Online News Stories” in J&MC Quarterly. An experiment and study was conducted to help answer this question. The study was designed to address the effects of source attribution in four distinct areas of news story perception: Credibility, Liking, Quality, and Representativeness. The study used a “Quote/No Quote” system where the subjects read stories some which had quotes and some that had no quotes at all. The subjects were given a short questionnaire at the end of reading each story.
After an extensive analysis of the study data the experiment found “significant differences in the readers’ perceptions of online news content as a function of source attribution.” All in all, the readers found the stories with source attribution “quoted” to be significantly more believable and objective than comparable news stories with identical content but without source attribution or “no quotes”.
The question then is, are quoted sources in online news as psychologically meaningful as non-quoted sources? This experiment shows this, and would probably still be true today if the experiment was updated and processed again.
References:
Sundar. S. (1998, March 1). Effect of Source Attribution on Perception of Online News Stories. Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly. Retrieved August 9, 2010 from: http://web.ebscohost.com.dml.regis.edu/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=12&hid=119&sid=0927399d-38f6-4cf2-bc2c-2384144b8a45%40sessionmgr111
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