Evaluating Credibility in Live Blogs. Focus Group Study on Immediacy, Covering Crisis, Politics and Sports

Journalism Practice, pp. 1–17

Abstract

Live blogs are a popular online news format that covers unfolding events in real time, often under conditions of uncertainty and through fragmented narratives combining multimodal sources. Despite these characteristics, which might challenge conventional notions of journalistic credibility, users spend considerably more time on live blogs than on regular online news. This raises the question of why audiences turn to live blogs for credible information in a high-choice media landscape. Although previous research has extensively examined the perceived credibility of online sources, messages, and media, little attention has been paid specifically to how users assess credibility within the live blog format. This study addresses this gap through six focus groups in which participants discussed credibility and the technical affordances of multimodality, interactivity, and hypertextuality across six Dutch live blogs. The findings suggest that engaging with a live blog is an active way of relating to an unfolding world. Rather than perceiving uncertainty and fragmentation as obstacles to credibility, participants often experience them as motivations to explore information further, resembling the dynamics of a detective story or adventure game. Users actively construct credibility by repairing inconsistencies, contextualizing interpretations they consider too narrow, and embracing the complexity and uncertainty inherent in unfolding events.

Authors 4

1. Sebastiaan van der Lubben corresponding

   University of Applied Sciences Utrecht

   Affiliation as printed

   Research Group Quality Journalism in Digital Transition, University of Applied Sciences, Utrecht, The Netherlands

2. Yael de Haan

   University of Applied Sciences Utrecht

   Affiliation as printed

   Research Group Quality Journalism in Digital Transition, University of Applied Sciences, Utrecht, The Netherlands

3. Jaap C. de Jong Aachen

   Leiden University

   Affiliation as printed

   Leiden University

4. Willem Koetsenruijter Aachen

   Leiden University

   Affiliation as printed

   Leiden University