Are Open News Systems Credible? - An Investigation Into Perceptions of Participatory and Citizen News

The growth of the web has led to a shift in the news industry and the emergence of novel news services. Due to the importance of news media in society it is important to understand how these systems work and how they are perceived. Previous work has ranked news systems in terms of their openness to user contribution, noting that the most open systems (such as YouTube) are typically not viewed as news systems at all, despite having most of the same functional characteristics. In this paper we explore whether credibility is an appropriate characteristic to explain this perception by presenting the results of a survey of 79 people regarding their credibility assessments of online news websites. We compare this perceived credibility with the openness of the systems as identified in previous work. Results show that there is a modest but significant correlation between the openness of a news system and its credibility, and suggest that credibility is an appropriate if imperfect explanation of the difference in perception of open and closed news systems.