EXPLORING THE IMPACT OF MODALITY ON PERCEPTIONS OF CREDIBILITY FOR ONLINE NEWS STORIES

The purpose of this experiment was to investigate the influence of website modality on people's perceptions of source and message credibility for an online news story. Findings indicated that increased modality in online news stories had no direct effect on perceived source or message credibility. However, a positive effect on perceived source credibility was observed when participants used multimedia content that was available in certain versions of the story. The implications of the findings are discussed.