Trust in Online Newsmedia

How does trust in online news change in the context of digital structural change? In their handbook article, Junior Professor Dr. Fabian Prochazka and Dr. Magdalena Obermaier show what role platforms, transparency and journalistic quality play in this - and what this means for democracy.

The article shows how credibility and trust attributions to news media take place in online communication. Due to a variety of alternatives to journalistic media, the trust of the audience has become more fragile and important as a result of digital structural change, and the use of news via personalized channels (e.g. social network platforms, aggregators) plays a particularly important role. We derive a number of possible effects of how personalized channels change the relationship of trust between the news media and the audience (including credibility and transparency effects, effects on the recognition of journalistic quality and on quality itself). Finally, we discuss the democratic consequences of media trust.

Click here for the article.

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