News Brand Attribution in Distributed Environments: Do People Know Where They Get Their News?

• In Event: News Exposure on Social Media

Abstract

The audience is increasingly receiving news via distributed services like search engines and social media. Given the centrality of news brands for the business of journalism and for news navigation, it is important to investigate whether people recognize the original content producer when they access news via such channels. In this paper, we measure “news brand attribution”: whether online news users correctly attribute stories they consumed to the brands that have produced them. Based on a unique combination of passive tracking of a panel of users over a four-week period followed by surveys, we find that news users are far more likely to correctly attribute a story to a news brand if they accessed it directly rather than via search or social media. We further find that correct attribution is significantly higher when people access stories from their main source of news, and spend more time with the story.

Authors

• Antonis Kalogeropoulos, Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism

• Richard Fletcher, Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism

• Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism