Algorithms in the newsroom? News readers’ perceived credibility and selection of automated journalism
Algorithms in the newsroom? News readers’ perceived credibility and selection of automated journalism
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新闻编辑室中的算法？新闻读者对自动化新闻的感知可信度和选择
DOI：
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发表时间：
2018
期刊：
影响因子：
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通讯作者：
Thomas E. Powell
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
A. Wölker;Thomas E. Powell
自动化新闻，即通过计算机算法自主生产新闻内容，在新闻编辑室中越来越突出。这使得能够快速且廉价地生产许多制品。然而，新闻读者如何看待新闻自动化对该行业至关重要，因为像任何产品一样，它取决于受众的认可。由于受众无法亲自核实所有事件，他们需要相信记者的报道，这使得可信度成为新闻业的一个重要品质。反过来，可信度的判断可能会影响观众的选择自动内容为他们的媒体饮食。这方面的研究很少，现有的研究集中在国家样本上，以前没有关于“联合”新闻的研究-这是一个相对新颖的发展，自动化内容由人类记者补充。我们使用一个实验来研究欧洲新闻读者（N = 300）如何看待不同形式的自动化新闻的消息和来源的可信度，以及这如何影响他们的选择行为。调查结果表明，在很大程度上，人类，自动化和组合内容和来源的可信度感知可能是平等的。只有体育文章的自动化内容被认为比人类信息更可信。此外，可信度并不介导的可能性，新闻读者选择或避免新闻消费的文章。除其他外，研究结果是由特定主题的因素解释的，并表明算法对新闻质量的影响在很大程度上是欧洲新闻读者无法察觉的。
Automated journalism, the autonomous production of journalistic content through computer algorithms, is increasingly prominent in newsrooms. This enables the production of numerous articles, both rapidly and cheaply. Yet, how news readers perceive journalistic automation is pivotal to the industry, as, like any product, it is dependent on audience approval. As audiences cannot verify all events themselves, they need to trust journalists’ accounts, which make credibility a vital quality ascription to journalism. In turn, credibility judgments might influence audiences’ selection of automated content for their media diet. Research in this area is scarce, with existing studies focusing on national samples and with no previous research on ‘combined’ journalism – a relatively novel development where automated content is supplemented by human journalists. We use an experiment to investigate how European news readers (N = 300) perceive different forms of automated journalism in regard to message and source credibility, and how this affects their selection behavior. Findings show that, in large part, credibility perceptions of human, automated, and combined content and source(s) may be assumed equal. Only for sports articles was automated content perceived significantly more credible than human messages. Furthermore, credibility does not mediate the likelihood of news readers to either select or avoid articles for news consumption. Findings are, among other things, explained by topic-specific factors and suggest that effects of algorithms on journalistic quality are largely indiscernible to European news readers.