IndexHuffington Post Literature ReviewCredibilityConnectionSocial PresenceCoorientationExpertiseOnline CredibilityHypotheses and MethodsDiscussionEvery citizen is a reporter, Oh Yeon-ho said when launching Ohmynews in 2004, largely as a fierce reaction to partisan politics in Korea of the South (Oh, 2004). “The citizens of the Republic of Korea have long been preparing for a major revolution in the culture of news production and consumption,” he said. “All I had to do was raise the flag.” The success of his site provided a high-profile example of a movement that many others had predicted. Glaser defined citizen journalism as the idea that “people without professional journalism training can use the tools of modern technology and the global distribution of the Internet to create, augment, or fact-check media on their own or in collaboration with others.” (2004). Gillmor (2004) applauded the ability of “people formerly known as the public” to bypass traditional news organizations, such as television networks, newspapers, and magazines, and report the news in their own way. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay When the citizen journalism movement reached the United States, however, it took on a very different flavor than the fierce political discussion of Ohmynews. The Northwest Voice, a citizen journalism website in Bakersfield, California, also started in early 2004 and became one of the first experiments in citizen journalism in the United States. Its content, however, focused more on human interest stories (Glaser, 2004). Some of the site's most viewed stories were on lighter topics, such as a mother's reaction to sending her child off to his first day of school (Meyer, 2006). Other citizen journalism sites have followed a similar script. In a case study of MyMissourian.com, a citizen journalism website in Columbia, Missouri, based on Northwest Voice, Bentley et. al (2007) found that the most popular stories were about issues that normally did not receive much attention from the mainstream media. Women, for example, filled the site with stories of their lives and causes, even though the site was originally created to discuss the 2004 presidential election (p. 249). The idea that citizen journalism exists to cover only issues relating to the fairer sex, however, is a misconception. Mayhill Fowler, for example, has been bucking the trend since 2008. The Huffington Post's Off the Bus project contained influential information about what political figures said in her presence without knowing that she was practicing as a journalist (Boehlert, 2009). Herboss Arianna Huffington is herself an influential figure in citizen journalism. “At HuffPost, we see citizen journalism as an integral part of what we do, and through Eyes and Ears, our citizen journalism community, we are harnessing the wisdom of the public to tackle stories too big for one reporter, attend events organized by journalists traditional ways that have been kept away (or overlooked) and to find and highlight the small but evocative story happening right next door,” she wrote (2009). Another citizen journalist argued that the movement needs more female voices to thrive.” If citizen journalism is to take the steps it should… there needs to be gender equality and a reliable sense of mutual respect. Otherwise it might as well be a tabloid. Silencing women's voices will only harm the concepts behind citizen journalism."(Askcherlock, 2010). For citizen journalism to make the strides towards gender equality mentioned by Askcherlock, media professionals and researchers need to better understand how audience members of both genders react to users. -generated content. They should also determine what role, if any, gender plays in credibility and some of its key components, such as social presence, coorientation, and competence. This is an important issue to consider as women have closed the gap in overall Internet use (Pew, 2012). ). Over 85% of men and women say they use the Web regularly. Citizen journalism opportunities are also expanding. Dube (2010) lists 23 citizen media initiatives created by legacy media organizations, including CNN's iReport, CBS's EyeMedia, BBC's iCan, and independent sites such as MapYourMoments. CNN paid more than $750,000 for the iReport domain name in 2008 to expand its ability to publish user-generated content (Learmonth, 2008). This study uses an online experiment to examine whether participants' reactions to stories published on a major news organization website differ based on the story's author and its self-reported genre. The study focuses specifically on credibility and measures that lead to it, such as social presence, coorientation, and competence, and asks whether, if at all, men and women react differently to staff writers and participatory journalists, especially if the author's gender corresponds to theirs. Social presence, for example, will respond if participants notice authors who share their gender more than others. Coorientation will help explain whether participants think authors share their beliefs and perceptions more if they also share their gender. Expertise, as a concept, will help explain whether participants think that authors who share their gender are more expert on the topic they are covering and therefore more trustworthy. Since this study deals with audience perceptions based on gender cues, it may also help explain why some authors would choose to hide or even alter their gender online to reach certain audiences. Literature Review Pearson (1982) was one of the first to suggest that male writers have more credibility than female writers. She also wrote in her book (1985) that female writers believed they would have more credibility if they were men, and writers of both sexes thought they had more credibility with members of their own sex than with those of the opposite sex. White and Andsager (1991) ) also suggested that women found newspaper opinion columns written by women more interesting than those written by men, whereas men felt the same about columns written by men. However, they suggested that there would be no difference in incredibleness between male and female writers, regardless of the reader's gender. In other words, the type of story, they suggested, mattered. News seems more credible on the surface than opinion columns. These credibility differences between men and women revolve around basic gender stereotypes (Deaux & Lewis, 1984). A gender label alone can lead people to infer a variety of gender-related characteristics (p. 1002). Several studies (Broverman, Vogel, Broverman, Clarkson, & Rosenkrantz, 1972; Rosenkrantz, Vogel, Bee, Broverman, & Broverman, 1968) have identified two sets of characteristics attributed to women and men. Subjects associated warmth and expressiveness with women more than men, and competence andrationality to men more than to women. Personality traits are the essence of gender stereotypes (Deaux and Lewis, 1984). Gender stereotypes are capable of uniting people and are also important in the process of social perception (Grant and Holmes, 1981, 1982). Deaux and Lewis (1984) also found information about how one component of the stereotype can influence other components. However, gender information alone does not lead to inferring a certain set of characteristics. “In most cases, however, the influence of gender can be counterbalanced by other information, such as role behaviors, traits, and the like” (p. 1002). In other words, if readers only know the author's name and have no other clues about the author's credibility, they may fall into gender stereotypes. These same gender stereotypes appear to influence how men and women use a medium. Men seek information on a wider variety of topics than women, “from finding products to buy, to getting information about their hobbies, to finding political news. Sometimes, men and women seek different types of information” (Fallows, 2005). After the events of September 11, men visited more websites to tell them about things that were happening; More and more women said the Internet helped them find the people they needed to reach. (p.iv). In the study, a higher percentage of women than men said they suffered from online information overload. While both men and women value what the Internet does for their lives, men said they value how it helps their activities, such as work and hobbies, more than women, while women value relationships with family, friends, colleagues and communities (page v). Both genders are increasingly exposed to cues that go beyond gender stereotypes to help them determine the credibility of information they find online. These other cues can mitigate the effect of gender stereotypes. Matheson (1991) found that within a computer-mediated communication environment, participants who thought they were interacting with a woman found her to be more cooperative and less exploitative. This only occurred when participants were explicitly told that the person on the other end of the conversation was a woman. “It is conceivable that such information focused subjects on characteristics of the other that were similar to their own, and thus invoked gender-relevant dimensions of themselves, which were, in turn, 'projected' onto the negotiator” (p. 143) . A strong prompt was needed to overcome other cues and get participants to return to their default understanding of gender. Flanagin and Metzger (2003) suggested that gender is a significant factor when examining measures of perceived website credibility. “It is the interaction between the sex of the author and that of the spectator that seems to underlie this relationship” (p. 698). For example, their research suggested that same-sex credibility ratings were lower than opposite-sex credibility ratings. Credibility would be higher when the gender of the message source matched the gender of the recipient. Four years later, Flanagin and Metzger (2007) highlighted the importance of website characteristics in determining perceived credibility. They suggested that the structure of a site, such as whether it was a news or shopping site, was the main determinant of credibility. Their previous study looked only at what they called “personal websites,” where a single author was clearly identified and she, in thiscase, he shared his life. For example, participants said that reviews on shopping sites from people like them were more credible than reviews from experts. On news websites, however, expert opinions were considered the most credible. Armstrong and McAdams (2009) supported these findings when they suggested that information seeking was a major determinant of credibility. Their study focused on blogs or blogs, one of the most common online forums with user-generated content. A blog allows an author to publish their news, thoughts, feelings, or opinions in a chronological format. A blog is primarily a content distribution system. The authors manipulated blog author gender descriptors and found that gender cues can influence the perceived credibility of blogs because individuals may perceive some topics as “belonging” to female or male bloggers or as requiring a particular expertise . They found that blog posts written by men were deemed more credible than those written by women, but the writing style and topic of the blog could also influence the perceived credibility of the post. As blogs become more widespread and accepted as credible sources of information, they suggest that gender cues would become less important. In fact, tone may have a greater influence than genre. A more cynical tone increased perceived credibility among young people. Credibility To understand the effect of genre on credibility, however, it is important to define the concept more precisely for the Internet age. Its definition is not as simple as it was 10 years ago. It's still true that the more credible people find a news source, the more likely they are to use it. However, people use media that they say is not credible. For example, Reeves and Nass (1996) found that audiences consistently give higher credibility scores to TV, even though TV stories lack depth and draw heavily on newspaper reports. The reason suggested was the human dimension. At its most basic level, credibility is not simply an objective measure of a medium's characteristics or messages (Flanagin & Metzger, 2007). It revolves around subjective assessments of how stories, sources, and organizations are presented. Reeves & Nass (1996), Wackman (1973), Kim (2010), Sundar (1999), and Rafaeli (1988) have shown that credibility must include measures of how much a person values ​​a medium, how much he or she has come to rely on it. The human dimension of the “crisis of credibility” that Gaziano first wrote about in 1986 has become even more complicated in 2012. The Internet has made more information available than ever before, confusing some of the fundamental concepts. concepts of traditional credibility. Deciding what is credible requires an even deeper examination of the relationships between people and their news sources. Early media scholars approached credibility from two parameters: Do you trust the media and believe what you read? Gaziano & McGrath (1986) expanded the definition to include 12 measures. Their scale combined questions about trust and credibility with concepts such as objectivity, complexity, completeness, truth and reputation. Despite the comprehensive nature of the Gaziano and McGrath scale, researchers found other elements. Meyer (1988), himself a former newspaper editor, reduced the Gaziano and McGrath scale to a single element – ​​credibility – while adding the idea of ​​community membership. Beaudoin and Thorson (2004) reinforced Meyer's addition by suggesting that credibility grows the more the newspaper connects to the community. Perloff (2003) addedAnother human element in examining persuasive research: perceived competence. Expertise links credibility to what people judge as the extent of a source's knowledge and experience on a topic. Another way to look at credibility is to break it down into separate components that examine message, source, and organizational credibility separately. Source credibility, for example, might include Perloff's dimension of expertise, while organizational credibility refers more to Meyer's addition of affiliation. Separating the concepts proved useful. Sundar (1999) demonstrated the need to self-examine source credibility when he asked readers to rate stories based on the type and number of quotes they contained. But he also found an interesting link between a person's relationship with a source and credibility. People judged sources based more on who the source was rather than what the source said. His study speaks to the personal nature of definitions of credibility, whether sources, messages, or organizations. The human elements of messages take three forms – social presence, coorientation and competence – which work together to create a connection that leads to credibility and overcomes gender stereotypes. ConnectionSocial PresenceThe ways in which non-human agents such as television news or even newspapers make recipients feel as if they are human constitutes what researchers call social presence. The three dimensions of social presence are (1) source attention, or how much attention the source receives in the presentation compared to other cues, (2) co-presence, or how much an audience member can sense the other person's existence, and ( 3) mutual awareness or the feeling of being “known” by another (Biocca et al., 2001; Gunawardena & Zittle, 1997; Tamborini & Skalski, 2005). Social presence is the personal characteristics that make a recipient connect with the source. It can be created from imagery, word choice, and tone, among other elements. Coorientation However, recognizing a human presence is not enough. Credibility also depends on how closely a person is allied with the source. Wackman (1973) wrote the goal of communication for exchanging information is to increase coorientation between two people. He defined coorientation as the level of similar attitudes and the perceived congruence of those attitudes. Finding something to relate to in the media isn't difficult. In fact, Reeves and Nass (1996) stated that it is natural. In what they called the “media equation,” they suggested that coorientation between source and recipient existed even when messages were disseminated through the media. People have evolved to respond to other humans. When they see something that looks like a human being, they respond to media in the same way they would to another person, and they tend to like media that acts humanely. Gender stereotypes play a role in how audiences relate to the media. Competence Another element of source credibility is perceived competence. Hovland et al. (1953) suggested two dimensions of source credibility: reliability and expertise. They argued that a recipient's tendency to accept a speaker's message depends on his or her estimate of how informed and intelligent the speaker is and how likely the speaker is to make valid points. Perloff (2003) defined competence as a fundamental characteristic of credible communicators. Whether a communicator should emphasize his or her expertise or similarity to the audience can be a dilemma. Stories on concrete topics,like news, they may rely more on expert knowledge than similarity (Perloff, 2003). For news to connect with readers, it must pay attention to each of three elements – social presence, coorientation and expertise – because stronger connections have the ability to dramatically alter perceptions. As connection grows, so does credibility. Sundar (1999) identified relatedness as one of four elements that define credibility both online and in newspapers. Greater social presence can also lead to trust, which according to Wanta (1994) can increase credibility. Defining credibility for the Internet age requires more than a simple study of site characteristics. Flanagin & Metzger (2007) found that the source matters. The nature of the organization and its messages were determining factors in the credibility assigned to interviewees. Participants consistently gave news sites the highest credibility scores, even when they had never seen that particular news site before. They could learn from the social cues provided by the site how credible it was, but, interestingly, the more social presence the site had, the less credible it was. Personal blogs were considered the least credible even when they contained the exact same, almost verbatim, stories as news and e-commerce sites. Meyer, Marchionni, and Thorson (2006) also found that social presence was not positively related to the credibility of news websites. The main predictor in their study was competence. Subsequent analyzes revealed that coorientation and not social presence positively predicted competence. Online Credibility The impact of new concepts of credibility, such as coorientation, social presence, expertise, and online interactivity does not invalidate more traditional definitions of credibility originally applied to newspapers. Online credibility must join the Web's ability to make connections through technology with traditional concepts of trust, credibility and competence. Defining credibility also requires an understanding of the values ​​and purpose of Web communication. The sites that connect most with audiences (Flanagin & Metzger, 2007) are sites that present trustworthy information in formats that speak to audiences and allow them to connect. Johnson & Kaye (2004 ) also suggest that relationships help determine why users sometimes rate opinionated blogs as more credible than news websites. They linked credibility both online and offline, with a person's familiarity with the medium. Those who are more familiar with the Internet and less with traditional media rate political blogs as more credible. Traditional media could attract audiences less familiar with traditional online news media if they more fully adopted the social presence and coorientation attributes of the Web. To measure and increase credibility in the Internet age, researchers must examine not only whether trust exists , conviction and competence. They need to consider how individuals come to create these feelings and how the options available online can help. More importantly, connection may allow us to overcome gender stereotypes in information processing. Hypotheses and methods Based on the literature, this study examined the following hypotheses in the context of citizen journalism: H1. Gender matching, or whether the recipient's gender matches that of the sources, will have a direct positive effect on perceived credibility for stories written by a news organization's staff writer. H2. Gender matching will have a direct positive effect onperception of credibility for stories written by members of the public. H3. The components of credibility, such as coorientation, social presence, and interest, will mitigate the effects of gender on credibility. The study is based on a 2 (story author) x 2 (author gender) within-subjects experiment, in which participants were asked to read four news stories, all seemingly from the same top news website. The stories were basic news on six separate topics selected to be non-controversial. The researchers specifically avoided stories that dealt with politics, religion or women's issues. Topics were technology, health, US news, entertainment, world news and crime. The gender of the story's author, along with whether the author was a staff writer or an audience member, was manipulated. Finally, each participant read a story written by a male and female writing staff and a male and female audience member. The order of authorship conditions, topics, and writer gender were randomized via a simple website-based program called PHP script. The random assignment and within-subjects design helped the experiment focus on the variance in authorship created, not other external factors. Respondents answered the same questions after each story. Respondents rated the social presence, expertise, coorientation, credibility, and interest they had in each story. The questions followed Meyer, Marchionni & Thorson (2010), who used a similar model to determine how participants rated the credibility of stories written in traditional news, opinion, and citizen journalism formats. Story headlines from this study included "After Tornado, City Rebuilds by Going Green," "Air Force One Backup Rattles New York's Nerves," "In the Digital Age, Movie Piracy Can Be Stopped ?" and “Students, musicians fight and fear the Taliban.” Social presence measured how much readers noticed the person behind the story, with questions such as “I felt like I knew the author,” “At times, I felt like the author was in the room with me,” and “ I thought about the author as I read the article." Expertise measured the level of expertise participants believed the author had on the topic through questions such as (a master's degree or a PhD). Another 53% reported income less than $25,000 per year, while 12% had income greater than $100,000 per year. History was the unit of analysis. Each participant therefore had six units of analysis. Statistical tests focused on differences between the sex of the participant and whether it matched that of the author. An independent-samples t-test focused on all stories, asking only whether it matched the genre. The only statistical significance was found when a member of the public was the perpetrator. Expertise (t(343)=-2.22, p<.01) and story credibility (t(343)=-2.66, p<.01) were both statistically significant in the negative direction. This meant that when the sex of the author did not match that of the participant, the story was rated less knowledgeable and less credible. (See Table 1). Next, the researchers examined whether there were differences between men and women based on paternity status. For men, the only statistically significant variable was the credibility of the story (t(374)=2.62, p<.01) if the story was written by a staff member.member. Male participants (see Table 3) found the story written by the staff more believable if genderof the author did not match. In other words, male participants rated stories written by female authors as more credible than those written by men. For women (see Table 4), statistical significance was found only for stories written by the public. If the sex of the author did not match that of the participant, women found less social presence (t(343)=-.248, p<.01), credibility of the story (t(343)=-2.42, p< .01) and interest (t(343)=-.346, p<.01). In other words, women assigned greater social presence, story credibility, and interest to stories written by other women. These t-tests provided no support for:H1: Story credibility will depend on genre matching for staff-written stories. H2: Credibility for audience-written stories will also depend on genre matching. For stories written by staff, only men seemed to care about gender match and were likely to rate stories written by women as more credible. For stories written by the public, women rated stories written by other women as more credible and also gave those stories higher social presence and coorientation scores. To determine the effects of variables that the literature suggests can predict credibility, univariate ANOVAs examined whether there was any interaction between story author and gender match. For men, only interest was statistically significant in the ANOVA (see Table 5), and gender match was the only influence. For women, social presence, story credibility, and interest had statistical significance, while experience, although significant in the ANOVA t test, had no statistical significance when gender match and authorship were were examined together (see Table 6). Social presence was not only significant for gender matching, but was significant for perpetrator status and interaction. Story credibility was significant for gender match and authorship, but not for interaction. Interest was significant in gender matching and interaction, but not in fathering. H3: Credibility predictors will mitigate the impact of gender cues. The only thing that affected men's credibility when the perpetrator's gender matched was interest, and this variable was not statistically significant for paternity status. In other words, interest determined credibility for men more than gender. For women, story believability was affected by both gender match and authorship, but not interaction. Paternity was statistically significant at the p<.01 level, while gender matching was significant at the p<.05 level. Women relate better to stories, written by staff or the public, that present their point of view, but they find stories written by staff more credible. However, interaction effects were found for social presence and interest, suggesting that these variables mediate gender effects. Women noticed more women in stories written by the public, while they gave higher interest scores to stories written by women, regardless of whether the author was a writer or a member of the public. Discussion These findings suggest that a more nuanced relationship between gender and credibility continues to emerge. online. This study examined the growing citizen journalism movement to determine whether stories written by the public are more susceptible to gender stereotypes. This was an effort to explore ways toencourage women to participate in citizen journalism, regardless of the content of the story. As Mayhill Fowler has shown, female citizen journalists are just as capable of covering politics as they are of covering their children's first day of school. What this study suggests is that traditional journalistic definitions of credibility apply to stories written by reporters on traditional media websites. The fact that it is a professionally produced story is a more powerful indicator of the credibility of the story than the genre. The author's manipulation did little to influence the participants in the experiment regarding the stories written by the staffer who is important in professional news, but it does not matter if his gender matches that of the members of the public. This may represent what Armstrong and McAdams (2009) predicted when blogs and other forms of user-generated content became more prevalent. What matters then is the competence and professionalism of the author, not whether he is a man or a woman. Simply connecting that author to a respected news organization builds trust in men and women. For user-generated content, however, gender stereotypes continue to have some influence, but that influence, for the most part, can be tempered by how connected a person feels to the story and the site behind it. Men, for example, found stories written by the public almost as credible as stories written by staff, while they found female writers more credible than male journalists. Women, on the other hand, only felt more connected to women writers when they were audience members. In other words, genre matters less than social presence, or the extent to which recipients notice the author behind the study. Men can simply choose the news that interests them, regardless of who wrote the story. This represents a repudiation of Pearson's early research that male writers are more credible. In fact, this study suggests that men may think female journalists write more interesting stories. This study offers some support to the perception that citizen journalism applies more to women than to men. Women seek a similar point of view when approaching citizen journalism. They look at other cues when reading stories written by staff, but rely somewhat on gender stereotypes for nontraditional stories. This confirms the findings of Armstrong and McAdams (2009) on blogs and those of Flanagin and Metzger (2003) on personal websites. Women are making clearer distinctions between citizen journalism and traditional online journalism, and are noticing gender distinctions more than men. What they notice most, this study suggests, is the presence of other women in citizen journalism forums and how credible their stories seem, not necessarily skills or expertise. coorientation. This may partially support the perception that women are more attracted to user-generated content, but not because the stories are produced by other women. They still judge him based on his perceived credibility. In other words, they don't greenlight content simply because the author is another woman. The lower scores given to women for interest could mean that they are more critical consumers of user-generated content, even if they appreciate the fact that other women are involved. The key for them was social presence or noticing the author's role in the story. Writers, both professional and amateur, who want to reach a female audience may want to focus more on standing out.