Conceptualizing sources in online news

This study attempts a new conceptualization of communication "sources" by p roposing a typology of sources that would apply not only to traditional med ia but also to new online media. Ontological rationale for the distinctions in the typology is supplemented by psychological evidence via an experimen t that investigated the effects of different types of source attributions u pon receivers' perception of one news content. Participants (N=48) in a 4-c ondition, between-participants experiments read 6 identical news stories ea ch through an online service. Participants were told that the stories were selected by 1 of 4 sources: news editors, the computer terminal on which th ey were accessing the stories, other audience members (or users) of the onl ine news service, or (using a pseudo-selection task) the individual user (s elf). After reading each online news story, all participants filled out a p aper-and-pencil questionnaire indicating their perceptions of the story the y had just read. In confirmation of the distinctions made in the typology, attribution of identical content of 4 different types of online sources was associated with significant variations in news story perception. Theoretic al implications of the results as well as the typology are discussed.