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Technological advances of the 21st century are changing how people get news and what they expect from it. How a message is presented-as straight, opinionated, collaborative, or blog news-affects its credibility. This experiment suggests that the strongest predictor of article and organizational credibility online is the author's perceived expertise, but in today's digital age, that expertise is largely determined by the level of coorientation between the sender and receiver.

Story comments offer a form of citizen engagement on news sites potentially important to democratic discourse. Yet few issues vex newsrooms more because of abusive rants, often from unnamed sources. This controlled experiment set out to test the “conversationalness” of commenting, using newly identified variables that theoretically measure the concept of journalism as a conversation. The study also tested whether commenting might help with reader trust. The data show that commenting's best indicators of conversation are perceived friendliness and social presence. But comments do not appear to help with journalism's most important values of perceived credibility and expertise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

References to the concept journalism-as-a-conversation abound in audience-centered literatures. Largely missing, though, are clear operational definitions. This exploratory study sought to help close that gap by finding a way to measure conversational journalism in terms of key socio-psychological and technological dimensions, then to test it on perceived credibility and expertise in newspaper sites. Findings suggest conversational journalism is powerful but nuanced. Conversation features most predictive of credibility and expertise were audience members’ perceived similarity to a journalist and that journalist’s online interactivity with the audience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hostile-media-effects research suggests some news consumers identify in even the most even-handed news storiesias against their own position. The present experiment searched for hostile media effects in people's responses to news stories and blogs that were either consistent or inconsistent with their own socio/political orientation. Contrary to hostile-media predictions, people did not view news stories as less credible after reading blogs that did not match their views. These results are interpreted in terms of the large influence of psychological variables on the processing of news and blogs: social presence and coorientation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]