Gender stereotypes and citizen journalism party politics in South Korea (Ah, 2004). “The citizens of the Republic of Korea have long been preparing for a great revolution in the culture of information production and consumption,” he said. “All I had to do was raise the flag.” The success of his site is a high-profile example of a movement that many others 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 verify facts, either on their own or by collaboration with others. (2004). Gillmor (2004) praised the ability of “people formerly known as the public” to bypass traditional news outlets, such as television networks, newspapers, and magazines, and report information on their own terms. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay When the citizen journalism movement reached the United States, it took on a much different flavor than the fierce political debate of Ohmynews. The Northwest Voice, a citizen journalism website in Bakersfield, California, also launched in early 2004 and became one of the first experiments in citizen journalism in the United States. Its content, however, was more focused 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 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 the Northwest Voice, Bentley et. al (2007) found that the most popular articles covered issues that did not normally receive much attention in mainstream media. Women, for example, filled the site with stories about their lives and causes, even though the site was originally created to discuss the 2004 presidential elections (p. 249). The idea that citizen journalism exists to only cover women's issues, however, is a bad idea. Mayhill Fowler, for example, has bucked the trend since 2008. The Huffington Post's Off the Bus project contained influential reporting on what political figures said in her presence, without knowing she was on the ground as a journalist (Boehlert, 2009). Herboss Arianna Huffington is herself an influential figure in citizen journalism. “At HuffPost, we consider citizen journalism an integral part of what we do – and, through Eyes and Ears, our citizen journalism community, we harness the wisdom of the public to tackle topics too important for a single journalist, assist to events that traditional journalists organize. been kept out (or neglected), and to find and shine a light on the small but evocative story happening right next door,” she wrote (2009). necessary progress… there must be gender parity and a reliable sense of mutual respect. Otherwise, this might as well be tabloid writing. Suppressing female voices will only harm the concepts behind journalismcitizen” (Askcherlock, 2010). For citizen journalism to achieve the progress in gender equality that Askcherlock mentions, media professionals and researchers need to better understand how audience members of both sexes respond to users. -generated content. They should also determine what role, if any, gender plays in credibility and some of its essential components, such as social presence, co-orientation, and expertise. This is an important issue to consider as women have closed the gap in overall Internet use (Pew, 2012). ). More than 85% of men and women say they use the Web regularly. Opportunities for citizen journalism are also increasing. Dube (2010) lists 23 citizen media initiatives created by traditional media organizations, including CNN's iReport, CBS' 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 articles published on the website of a major news organization differ based on the author of the story and their reported gender. The study focuses specifically on credibility and the measures that lead to it, such as social presence, co-orientation and expertise, and asks whether, if at all, men and women respond differently to staff writers and citizen journalists, particularly if the author's gender matches theirs. Social presence, for example, will determine whether participants notice authors who share their gender more than others. Co-orientation will help explain whether participants believe that authors share their beliefs and perceptions more if they also share their gender. Expertise, as a concept, will help explain whether participants believe that authors who share their gender are more expert on the topic they cover and therefore more trustworthy. As this study addresses audience perceptions based on gender cues, it could also help understand why some authors choose to hide or even change their gender online to reach a certain audience. 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 thought they would have more credibility if they were men, and that 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 suggest that women find opinion columns written by women more interesting than those written by men, while men feel the same about columns written by men. However, they suggested that there would be no difference in disbelief between male and female writers, regardless of the gender of the reader. In other words, the type of story, they suggested, mattered. News articles appear more credible on the surface than opinion columns. These differences in credibility between men and women revolve around fundamental gender stereotypes (Deaux and Lewis, 1984). A gender label alone can lead people to infer various gender-related characteristics (p. 1002). Several studies (Broverman, Vogel, Broverman, Clarkson and Rosenkrantz, 1972; Rosenkrantz, Vogel, Bee, Broverman and Broverman, 1968) have identified two setscharacteristics attributed to women and men. Subjects associated warmth and expressiveness with women more than with men, and competence and rationality with men more than with women. Personality traits are the essence of gender stereotypes (Deaux & Lewis, 1984). Gender stereotypes are able to bind people together and are also important in the process of social perception (Grant and Holmes, 1981, 1982). Deaux and Lewis (1984) also found information on how one component of the stereotype can influence other components. However, gender information alone does not allow one to infer a certain set of characteristics. “In most cases, however, the influence of gender can be balanced by other information, such as behaviors, character traits, etc. » (p. 1002). In other words, if readers only know the author's name and lack other clues to their credibility, they risk falling prey to gender stereotypes. These same gender stereotypes seem to determine how men and women use media. 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 9/11, men visited more websites to talk to them about what was happening; more women said the Internet helped them find the people they needed to reach. (p.iv). In the study, a greater percentage of women than men reported suffering from online information overload. While men and women both appreciate what the Internet does for their lives, men said they appreciate more than women how it helps them with their activities, such as their jobs and hobbies. , while women valued relationships with family, friends, colleagues, and community (p. v). 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 in 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 happened when participants were explicitly informed that the person on the other side of the conversation was female. "It is conceivable that such information focused subjects on characteristics of the other that were similar to their own, and thus evoked gender-relevant dimensions of themselves, which were, in turn, 'projected' “on the negotiator” (p. 143). It took a strong suggestion to override the other cues and get participants to return to their default understanding of gender. Flanagin and Metzger (2003) suggested that gender is an important factor when examining measures of a website's perceived credibility. “It is the interaction between the sex of the author and that of the spectator which seems to be the basis of this relationship” (p. 698). For example, their research suggests that same-sex credibility ratings were lower than opposite-sex credibility ratings. Credibility would be higher when the gender of the source of the message matched that of the recipient. Four years later, Flanagin and Metzger (2007) highlighted the importance of website features in determining perceived credibility. They havesuggested that the setting of a site, such as whether it was a news site or a commercial site, was the primary determination of credibility. Their previous study looked only at what they called "personal websites," where only one author was clearly identified and, in this case, shared their life. For example, participants said reviews posted on shopping websites by people like themselves were more credible than reviews from experts. However, on news sites, experts' opinions were considered the most credible. Armstrong and McAdams (2009) confirmed these findings when they suggested that information seeking was one of the primary determinants of credibility. Their study focused on weblogs or blogs, one of the most common user-generated content forums online. A blog allows an author to post their own news or thoughts, feelings or opinions in a chronological format. A blog is above all a content distribution system. The authors manipulated blog author gender descriptors and found that gender cues can influence the perceived credibility of blogs, as individuals may perceive certain topics as "belonging" to female or male bloggers or as demanding particular expertise. They found that blog posts written by men were rated more credible than those written by women, but that the writing style and topic of the blog were also likely to influence the perceived credibility of the post. As blogs become more prevalent and accepted as credible sources of information, they suggest that gender cues would become less important. Tone, in fact, might have a greater influence than genre. A more cynical tone increased perceived credibility among young people. CredibilityTo understand the effect of gender on credibility, however, it is important to define the concept more precisely in the Internet age. Its definition is not as simple as it was ten years ago. The fact remains that the more people are credible and find a source of information, the more likely they will be to use it. However, people use media that they say is not credible. For example, Reeves and Nass (1996) found that audiences consistently gave higher credibility ratings to television, even though television reports lacked depth and borrowed heavily from newspaper reports. The reason given was the human dimension. At its most fundamental level, credibility is not simply an objective measure of a media's characteristics or messages (Flanagin and 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) showed that credibility should include measures of how much a person likes a medium, how much they like it, came to lean on him. The human dimension of the “credibility crisis” that Gaziano first wrote about in 1986 has become even more complicated in 2012. The Internet has made more information available than ever before, while blurring some of the essential information. concepts of traditional credibility. Deciding what is credible requires looking even more closely at the relationships between people and their sources of information. Early media scholars approached credibility through two measures: do you trust the media and do you believe what you read? Gaziano and McGrath (1986) expanded the definition to include 12 measures. Their scale combined questions on confidence andcredibility to concepts such as objectivity, complexity, completeness, truth and reputation. Despite the comprehensive nature of Gaziano and McGrath's scale, researchers discovered other elements. Meyer (1988), himself a former newspaper editor, reduced Gaziano and McGrath's scale to a single element – credibility – while adding the idea of community affiliation. Beaudoin and Thorson (2004) reinforced Meyer's addition by suggesting that credibility increases as the newspaper connects with the community. Perloff (2003) added another human element to the examination of persuasive research: perceived expertise. Expertise relates credibility to what people judge to be 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 elements that look at the message, the source, and the credibility of the organization separately. Source credibility, for example, might include Perloff's expertise dimension, while organizational credibility spoke more to Meyer's affiliation addition. Separating the concepts was helpful. Sundar (1999) demonstrated the need to examine source credibility alone when he asked readers to evaluate articles based on the type and number of citations they had. But he also discovered an interesting connection between a person's relationship with a source and their credibility. People judged sources more based on who the source was rather than what the source said. His study demonstrates the personal nature of definitions of credibility, whether they relate to sources, messages or organizations. The human elements of messages take three forms – social presence, co-orientation and expertise – which work together to create a connection that leads to credibility and transcends gender stereotypes.ConnectionSocial PresenceThe way in which non-human agents such as television news or even newspapers make receivers feel human, which constitutes what researchers call social presence. The three dimensions of social presence are (1) source attention, or the degree of attention the source receives in the presentation relative to other cues, (2) co-presence, or the extent in which an audience member can sense the existence of the other person, and (3) mutual presence. 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 allow a receiver to connect with the source. It can be created from images, word choices, and tone, among other elements. Coorientation Recognizing a human presence is not enough, however. Credibility also depends on the closeness of a person's alliance with the source. Wackman (1973) wrote the goal of communication for information exchange is to increase coorientation between two people. He defined coorientation as the level of similar attitudes and the perceived congruence of these attitudes. Finding something to relate to in the media is not difficult. In fact, Reeves and Nass (1996) argue that it is natural. In what they call the “media equation,” they suggest that coorientation between source and receiver existed even when messages were disseminated by the media. People evolved to respond to other humans. When they see something that looks human, they react to media the same way they would to another person, and they tend to like media that acts human. Gender stereotypes play a role in howpublic refers to the media. ExpertiseAnother element of source credibility is perceived expertise. Hovland et al. (1953) suggest two dimensions of source credibility: reliability and expertise. They argued that a receiver's tendency to accept a speaker's message depends on his or her estimation of how informed and intelligent the speaker is and how likely he or she is to make valid points. Perloff (2003) defined expertise as an essential characteristic of credible communicators. Whether a communicator should emphasize their expertise or their similarity to the audience can be a dilemma. Stories about factual topics, such as news, may rely more on expert knowledge than similarity (Perloff, 2003). For information to resonate with readers, it must pay attention to each of three elements – social presence, co-orientation and expertise – because stronger connections have the capacity to radically shift perceptions. As the connection grows, so does the credibility. Sundar (1999) identified relatedness as one of the four elements that define credibility both online and in newspapers. Greater social presence can also lead to addiction, which Wanta (1994) suggests can increase credibility. Defining credibility in the Internet age requires more than just studying site characteristics. Flanagin and Metzger (2007) found that the source matters. The nature of the organization and its messages were determining factors in the credibility attributed to respondents. Participants consistently gave news sites the highest credibility scores, even if they had never seen that particular news site before. They could learn from the social signals 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 stories, almost verbatim, 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 sites. The main predictor in their study was expertise. Subsequent analysis revealed that coorientation, not social presence, positively predicted expertise. Online Credibility The impact of new credibility concepts, such as co-orientation, 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 connect through technology with traditional concepts of trust, credibility, and expertise. Defining credibility also requires an understanding of the values and purpose of web communication. The sites that have connected the most with audiences (Flanagin & Metzger, 2007) are sites that present reliable information in formats that speak to the audience and allow them to connect. Johnson & Kaye (2004) also suggest that relationships help determine why users sometimes judge opinion blogs more credible than news websites. They linked credibility, both online and offline, to how familiar a person is with the medium. Those who are more familiar with the Internet and less familiar with traditional media judge political blogs to be more credible. Traditional media could attract audiences less familiar with news mediatraditional online if they adopted more social media.Web presence and co-orientation attributes. To measure and increase credibility in the Internet age, researchers must not only examine whether trust, belief, and expertise exist. They need to examine how individuals come to create these feelings and how the options available online can help them. More importantly, connection can 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 gender of the recipient matches that of the sources, has a direct positive effect on perceptions of credibility of articles written by a news agency editor. H2. Gender matching will have a direct positive effect on audience members' perceptions of credibility of articles written. H3. Components of credibility, such as coorientation, social presence, and interest, will moderate the effects of gender on credibility. The study is based on a 2 (story author) x 2 (author gender) within-subjects experiment, which asked participants to read four news reports, all apparently from the same major news story. website. The articles were basic reporting on six separate topics selected to avoid controversy. The researchers specifically avoided stories dealing with politics, religion or women's issues. Topics covered included technology, health, US news, entertainment, world news and crime. The gender of the story's author, as well as whether the author was an editor or a member of the public, was manipulated. At the end, each participant read a story written by a male and female author and a male and female audience member. The order of authorship conditions, subjects, and author gender were randomized via a simple website-based program called a PHP script. The random assignment and within-subject design helped the experiment focus on authorship created by variance, not other external factors. Respondents answered the same questions after each story. Respondents rated their social presence, expertise, co-orientation, credibility, and interest in each story. The questions followed Meyer, Marchionni, and Thorson (2010), who used a similar model to determine how participants ranked the credibility of articles written in traditional news, opinion, and citizen journalism formats. Article titles in this study included "After tornado, city rebuilds by going green," "Air Force One backup rattles New York's nerves," "In the digital age, hacking of Can films be stopped? and “Students and 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,” “Sometimes I felt like the author was in the room with me” and “I thought of the author while reading the article.” Expertise measured the level of competence participants thought they had on the topic using questions such as (either a master's degree or a doctorate). 53% reported incomes of less than $25,000 per year, while 12% had incomes of more than $100,000 per year. The story was the unit of analysis. Each participant then had six units of analysis. Statistical tests focused on differences betweenthe gender of the participant and whether it matched that of the author. An independent samples t-test focused on all stories, asking only whether gender matched. The only statistical significance was found when a member of the public was the author. Expertise (t(343)=-2.22, p<0.01) and story credibility (t(343)=-2.66, p<0.01) were both statistically significant in the negative sense. This meant that when the gender of the author did not match that of the participant, the story was judged to be less expert and less credible. (See table 1). Next, the researchers examined whether there was a difference between men and women based on paternity conditions. For men, the only statistically significant variable was story credibility (t(374) = 2.62, p < .01) if the story was written by a staff member. Male participants (see Table 3) found the story written by staff more credible if the gender of the author did not match. In other words, male participants rated stories written by women as more credible than those written by men. For women (see Table 4), statistical significance was only found for audience-written stories. If the gender of the author did not match that of the participant, women found less social presence (t(343)=-0.248, p<0.01), credibility of the story (t(343)= -2.42, p<0.01) and of interest. (t(343)=-0.346, p<0.01). In other words, women gave more social presence, credibility to the story, and interest in stories written by other women. These T-tests provided no support for: H1: Story credibility will depend on gender matching for staff-written stories. H2: The credibility of audience-written stories will also depend on gender matching. For articles written by staff, only men seemed to care about gender concordance and were likely to rate articles written by women more credible. For stories written by the audience, women rated stories written by other women more credible and also gave these 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 an interaction between story author and gender concordance. For men, only interest was statistically significant in the ANOVA (see Table 5), and gender fit was the only influence. For women, social presence, story credibility, and interest had statistical significance, while expertise, although significant in the ANOVA, was statistically significant. The t-test had no statistical significance when the correspondence between gender and paternity were examined together (see Table 6). Social presence was not significant for gender match alone, but it was significant for both author condition and interaction. Story credibility was significant for gender matching and authorship, but not for interaction. Interest was significant for gender matching and interaction, but not for authorship. H3: Credibility predictors will attenuate the impact of gender cues. The only element that affected men's credibility when the author's gender matched was interest, and this variable was not statistically significant for author condition. In other words, interest determined the credibility of men more thansex. For women, story credibility was affected by both gender appropriateness and authorship, but not by interaction. Paternity was statistically significant at the p < 0.01 level, while gender concordance was significant at the p < 0.05 level. Women relate better to stories written by staff or the public, which present their point of view, but 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 other women more in audience-written stories, while they gave higher interest scores to stories written by women, whether the author was an editor or an audience member. Discussion These results 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 sensitive to gender stereotypes. This was an effort to explore ways to encourage women to participate in citizen journalism, regardless of the content of the story. As Mayhill Fowler demonstrated, female citizen journalists are just as capable of covering politics as they are of chronicling their child's first day of school. What this study suggests is that traditional journalistic definitions of credibility apply to articles written by journalists on traditional media websites. The fact that it is a professionally produced story is a stronger indicator of the story's credibility than gender. Author manipulation had little influence on experiment participants when it came to staff-written stories. It is important in professional news, but the fact that one's gender matches that of audience members does not. is not. This may be what Armstrong and McAdams (2009) predicted when blogs and other forms of user-generated content become more common. What matters then is the expertise and professionalism of the author, not whether he is a man or a woman. Simply attaching this author to a respected news agency engenders trust among men and women. However, for user-generated content, gender stereotypes continue to have some influence, but this influence, for the most part, can be mitigated by the degree of connection a person feels with it. the history and site behind it. Men, for example, found stories written by the public almost as credible as stories written by staff, while they found female editors more credible than male reporters. Women, on the other hand, only felt more connected to writers when they were members of the public. In other words, gender matters less than social presence or the extent to which receivers notice the author behind the study. Men can simply choose information that interests them, regardless of who wrote the story. This represents a rejection of Pearson's early research that male writers are more credible. In fact, this study suggests that men may think that female journalists write more interesting stories. This study to some extent supports the perception that citizen journalism concerns women more than men. Women seek a similar perspective when approaching citizen journalism. They look at other clues when reading.

Essay / Gender stereotypes and citizen journalism party politics in South Korea (Ah, 2004). “The citizens of the Republic of Korea have long been preparing for a great revolution in the culture of information production and consumption,” he said. “All I had to do was raise the flag.” The success of his site is a high-profile example of a movement that many others 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 verify facts, either on their own or by collaboration with others. (2004). Gillmor (2004) praised the ability of “people formerly known as the public” to bypass traditional news outlets, such as television networks, newspapers, and magazines, and report information on their own terms. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay When the citizen journalism movement reached the United States, it took on a much different flavor than the fierce political debate of Ohmynews. The Northwest Voice, a citizen journalism website in Bakersfield, California, also launched in early 2004 and became one of the first experiments in citizen journalism in the United States. Its content, however, was more focused 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 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 the Northwest Voice, Bentley et. al (2007) found that the most popular articles covered issues that did not normally receive much attention in mainstream media. Women, for example, filled the site with stories about their lives and causes, even though the site was originally created to discuss the 2004 presidential elections (p. 249). The idea that citizen journalism exists to only cover women's issues, however, is a bad idea. Mayhill Fowler, for example, has bucked the trend since 2008. The Huffington Post's Off the Bus project contained influential reporting on what political figures said in her presence, without knowing she was on the ground as a journalist (Boehlert, 2009). Herboss Arianna Huffington is herself an influential figure in citizen journalism. “At HuffPost, we consider citizen journalism an integral part of what we do – and, through Eyes and Ears, our citizen journalism community, we harness the wisdom of the public to tackle topics too important for a single journalist, assist to events that traditional journalists organize. been kept out (or neglected), and to find and shine a light on the small but evocative story happening right next door,” she wrote (2009). necessary progress… there must be gender parity and a reliable sense of mutual respect. Otherwise, this might as well be tabloid writing. Suppressing female voices will only harm the concepts behind journalismcitizen” (Askcherlock, 2010). For citizen journalism to achieve the progress in gender equality that Askcherlock mentions, media professionals and researchers need to better understand how audience members of both sexes respond to users. -generated content. They should also determine what role, if any, gender plays in credibility and some of its essential components, such as social presence, co-orientation, and expertise. This is an important issue to consider as women have closed the gap in overall Internet use (Pew, 2012). ). More than 85% of men and women say they use the Web regularly. Opportunities for citizen journalism are also increasing. Dube (2010) lists 23 citizen media initiatives created by traditional media organizations, including CNN's iReport, CBS' 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 articles published on the website of a major news organization differ based on the author of the story and their reported gender. The study focuses specifically on credibility and the measures that lead to it, such as social presence, co-orientation and expertise, and asks whether, if at all, men and women respond differently to staff writers and citizen journalists, particularly if the author's gender matches theirs. Social presence, for example, will determine whether participants notice authors who share their gender more than others. Co-orientation will help explain whether participants believe that authors share their beliefs and perceptions more if they also share their gender. Expertise, as a concept, will help explain whether participants believe that authors who share their gender are more expert on the topic they cover and therefore more trustworthy. As this study addresses audience perceptions based on gender cues, it could also help understand why some authors choose to hide or even change their gender online to reach a certain audience. 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 thought they would have more credibility if they were men, and that 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 suggest that women find opinion columns written by women more interesting than those written by men, while men feel the same about columns written by men. However, they suggested that there would be no difference in disbelief between male and female writers, regardless of the gender of the reader. In other words, the type of story, they suggested, mattered. News articles appear more credible on the surface than opinion columns. These differences in credibility between men and women revolve around fundamental gender stereotypes (Deaux and Lewis, 1984). A gender label alone can lead people to infer various gender-related characteristics (p. 1002). Several studies (Broverman, Vogel, Broverman, Clarkson and Rosenkrantz, 1972; Rosenkrantz, Vogel, Bee, Broverman and Broverman, 1968) have identified two setscharacteristics attributed to women and men. Subjects associated warmth and expressiveness with women more than with men, and competence and rationality with men more than with women. Personality traits are the essence of gender stereotypes (Deaux & Lewis, 1984). Gender stereotypes are able to bind people together and are also important in the process of social perception (Grant and Holmes, 1981, 1982). Deaux and Lewis (1984) also found information on how one component of the stereotype can influence other components. However, gender information alone does not allow one to infer a certain set of characteristics. “In most cases, however, the influence of gender can be balanced by other information, such as behaviors, character traits, etc. » (p. 1002). In other words, if readers only know the author's name and lack other clues to their credibility, they risk falling prey to gender stereotypes. These same gender stereotypes seem to determine how men and women use media. 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 9/11, men visited more websites to talk to them about what was happening; more women said the Internet helped them find the people they needed to reach. (p.iv). In the study, a greater percentage of women than men reported suffering from online information overload. While men and women both appreciate what the Internet does for their lives, men said they appreciate more than women how it helps them with their activities, such as their jobs and hobbies. , while women valued relationships with family, friends, colleagues, and community (p. v). 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 in 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 happened when participants were explicitly informed that the person on the other side of the conversation was female. "It is conceivable that such information focused subjects on characteristics of the other that were similar to their own, and thus evoked gender-relevant dimensions of themselves, which were, in turn, 'projected' “on the negotiator” (p. 143). It took a strong suggestion to override the other cues and get participants to return to their default understanding of gender. Flanagin and Metzger (2003) suggested that gender is an important factor when examining measures of a website's perceived credibility. “It is the interaction between the sex of the author and that of the spectator which seems to be the basis of this relationship” (p. 698). For example, their research suggests that same-sex credibility ratings were lower than opposite-sex credibility ratings. Credibility would be higher when the gender of the source of the message matched that of the recipient. Four years later, Flanagin and Metzger (2007) highlighted the importance of website features in determining perceived credibility. They havesuggested that the setting of a site, such as whether it was a news site or a commercial site, was the primary determination of credibility. Their previous study looked only at what they called "personal websites," where only one author was clearly identified and, in this case, shared their life. For example, participants said reviews posted on shopping websites by people like themselves were more credible than reviews from experts. However, on news sites, experts' opinions were considered the most credible. Armstrong and McAdams (2009) confirmed these findings when they suggested that information seeking was one of the primary determinants of credibility. Their study focused on weblogs or blogs, one of the most common user-generated content forums online. A blog allows an author to post their own news or thoughts, feelings or opinions in a chronological format. A blog is above all a content distribution system. The authors manipulated blog author gender descriptors and found that gender cues can influence the perceived credibility of blogs, as individuals may perceive certain topics as "belonging" to female or male bloggers or as demanding particular expertise. They found that blog posts written by men were rated more credible than those written by women, but that the writing style and topic of the blog were also likely to influence the perceived credibility of the post. As blogs become more prevalent and accepted as credible sources of information, they suggest that gender cues would become less important. Tone, in fact, might have a greater influence than genre. A more cynical tone increased perceived credibility among young people. CredibilityTo understand the effect of gender on credibility, however, it is important to define the concept more precisely in the Internet age. Its definition is not as simple as it was ten years ago. The fact remains that the more people are credible and find a source of information, the more likely they will be to use it. However, people use media that they say is not credible. For example, Reeves and Nass (1996) found that audiences consistently gave higher credibility ratings to television, even though television reports lacked depth and borrowed heavily from newspaper reports. The reason given was the human dimension. At its most fundamental level, credibility is not simply an objective measure of a media's characteristics or messages (Flanagin and 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) showed that credibility should include measures of how much a person likes a medium, how much they like it, came to lean on him. The human dimension of the “credibility crisis” that Gaziano first wrote about in 1986 has become even more complicated in 2012. The Internet has made more information available than ever before, while blurring some of the essential information. concepts of traditional credibility. Deciding what is credible requires looking even more closely at the relationships between people and their sources of information. Early media scholars approached credibility through two measures: do you trust the media and do you believe what you read? Gaziano and McGrath (1986) expanded the definition to include 12 measures. Their scale combined questions on confidence andcredibility to concepts such as objectivity, complexity, completeness, truth and reputation. Despite the comprehensive nature of Gaziano and McGrath's scale, researchers discovered other elements. Meyer (1988), himself a former newspaper editor, reduced Gaziano and McGrath's scale to a single element – credibility – while adding the idea of community affiliation. Beaudoin and Thorson (2004) reinforced Meyer's addition by suggesting that credibility increases as the newspaper connects with the community. Perloff (2003) added another human element to the examination of persuasive research: perceived expertise. Expertise relates credibility to what people judge to be 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 elements that look at the message, the source, and the credibility of the organization separately. Source credibility, for example, might include Perloff's expertise dimension, while organizational credibility spoke more to Meyer's affiliation addition. Separating the concepts was helpful. Sundar (1999) demonstrated the need to examine source credibility alone when he asked readers to evaluate articles based on the type and number of citations they had. But he also discovered an interesting connection between a person's relationship with a source and their credibility. People judged sources more based on who the source was rather than what the source said. His study demonstrates the personal nature of definitions of credibility, whether they relate to sources, messages or organizations. The human elements of messages take three forms – social presence, co-orientation and expertise – which work together to create a connection that leads to credibility and transcends gender stereotypes.ConnectionSocial PresenceThe way in which non-human agents such as television news or even newspapers make receivers feel human, which constitutes what researchers call social presence. The three dimensions of social presence are (1) source attention, or the degree of attention the source receives in the presentation relative to other cues, (2) co-presence, or the extent in which an audience member can sense the existence of the other person, and (3) mutual presence. 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 allow a receiver to connect with the source. It can be created from images, word choices, and tone, among other elements. Coorientation Recognizing a human presence is not enough, however. Credibility also depends on the closeness of a person's alliance with the source. Wackman (1973) wrote the goal of communication for information exchange is to increase coorientation between two people. He defined coorientation as the level of similar attitudes and the perceived congruence of these attitudes. Finding something to relate to in the media is not difficult. In fact, Reeves and Nass (1996) argue that it is natural. In what they call the “media equation,” they suggest that coorientation between source and receiver existed even when messages were disseminated by the media. People evolved to respond to other humans. When they see something that looks human, they react to media the same way they would to another person, and they tend to like media that acts human. Gender stereotypes play a role in howpublic refers to the media. ExpertiseAnother element of source credibility is perceived expertise. Hovland et al. (1953) suggest two dimensions of source credibility: reliability and expertise. They argued that a receiver's tendency to accept a speaker's message depends on his or her estimation of how informed and intelligent the speaker is and how likely he or she is to make valid points. Perloff (2003) defined expertise as an essential characteristic of credible communicators. Whether a communicator should emphasize their expertise or their similarity to the audience can be a dilemma. Stories about factual topics, such as news, may rely more on expert knowledge than similarity (Perloff, 2003). For information to resonate with readers, it must pay attention to each of three elements – social presence, co-orientation and expertise – because stronger connections have the capacity to radically shift perceptions. As the connection grows, so does the credibility. Sundar (1999) identified relatedness as one of the four elements that define credibility both online and in newspapers. Greater social presence can also lead to addiction, which Wanta (1994) suggests can increase credibility. Defining credibility in the Internet age requires more than just studying site characteristics. Flanagin and Metzger (2007) found that the source matters. The nature of the organization and its messages were determining factors in the credibility attributed to respondents. Participants consistently gave news sites the highest credibility scores, even if they had never seen that particular news site before. They could learn from the social signals 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 stories, almost verbatim, 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 sites. The main predictor in their study was expertise. Subsequent analysis revealed that coorientation, not social presence, positively predicted expertise. Online Credibility The impact of new credibility concepts, such as co-orientation, 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 connect through technology with traditional concepts of trust, credibility, and expertise. Defining credibility also requires an understanding of the values and purpose of web communication. The sites that have connected the most with audiences (Flanagin & Metzger, 2007) are sites that present reliable information in formats that speak to the audience and allow them to connect. Johnson & Kaye (2004) also suggest that relationships help determine why users sometimes judge opinion blogs more credible than news websites. They linked credibility, both online and offline, to how familiar a person is with the medium. Those who are more familiar with the Internet and less familiar with traditional media judge political blogs to be more credible. Traditional media could attract audiences less familiar with news mediatraditional online if they adopted more social media.Web presence and co-orientation attributes. To measure and increase credibility in the Internet age, researchers must not only examine whether trust, belief, and expertise exist. They need to examine how individuals come to create these feelings and how the options available online can help them. More importantly, connection can 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 gender of the recipient matches that of the sources, has a direct positive effect on perceptions of credibility of articles written by a news agency editor. H2. Gender matching will have a direct positive effect on audience members' perceptions of credibility of articles written. H3. Components of credibility, such as coorientation, social presence, and interest, will moderate the effects of gender on credibility. The study is based on a 2 (story author) x 2 (author gender) within-subjects experiment, which asked participants to read four news reports, all apparently from the same major news story. website. The articles were basic reporting on six separate topics selected to avoid controversy. The researchers specifically avoided stories dealing with politics, religion or women's issues. Topics covered included technology, health, US news, entertainment, world news and crime. The gender of the story's author, as well as whether the author was an editor or a member of the public, was manipulated. At the end, each participant read a story written by a male and female author and a male and female audience member. The order of authorship conditions, subjects, and author gender were randomized via a simple website-based program called a PHP script. The random assignment and within-subject design helped the experiment focus on authorship created by variance, not other external factors. Respondents answered the same questions after each story. Respondents rated their social presence, expertise, co-orientation, credibility, and interest in each story. The questions followed Meyer, Marchionni, and Thorson (2010), who used a similar model to determine how participants ranked the credibility of articles written in traditional news, opinion, and citizen journalism formats. Article titles in this study included "After tornado, city rebuilds by going green," "Air Force One backup rattles New York's nerves," "In the digital age, hacking of Can films be stopped? and “Students and 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,” “Sometimes I felt like the author was in the room with me” and “I thought of the author while reading the article.” Expertise measured the level of competence participants thought they had on the topic using questions such as (either a master's degree or a doctorate). 53% reported incomes of less than $25,000 per year, while 12% had incomes of more than $100,000 per year. The story was the unit of analysis. Each participant then had six units of analysis. Statistical tests focused on differences betweenthe gender of the participant and whether it matched that of the author. An independent samples t-test focused on all stories, asking only whether gender matched. The only statistical significance was found when a member of the public was the author. Expertise (t(343)=-2.22, p<0.01) and story credibility (t(343)=-2.66, p<0.01) were both statistically significant in the negative sense. This meant that when the gender of the author did not match that of the participant, the story was judged to be less expert and less credible. (See table 1). Next, the researchers examined whether there was a difference between men and women based on paternity conditions. For men, the only statistically significant variable was story credibility (t(374) = 2.62, p < .01) if the story was written by a staff member. Male participants (see Table 3) found the story written by staff more credible if the gender of the author did not match. In other words, male participants rated stories written by women as more credible than those written by men. For women (see Table 4), statistical significance was only found for audience-written stories. If the gender of the author did not match that of the participant, women found less social presence (t(343)=-0.248, p<0.01), credibility of the story (t(343)= -2.42, p<0.01) and of interest. (t(343)=-0.346, p<0.01). In other words, women gave more social presence, credibility to the story, and interest in stories written by other women. These T-tests provided no support for: H1: Story credibility will depend on gender matching for staff-written stories. H2: The credibility of audience-written stories will also depend on gender matching. For articles written by staff, only men seemed to care about gender concordance and were likely to rate articles written by women more credible. For stories written by the audience, women rated stories written by other women more credible and also gave these 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 an interaction between story author and gender concordance. For men, only interest was statistically significant in the ANOVA (see Table 5), and gender fit was the only influence. For women, social presence, story credibility, and interest had statistical significance, while expertise, although significant in the ANOVA, was statistically significant. The t-test had no statistical significance when the correspondence between gender and paternity were examined together (see Table 6). Social presence was not significant for gender match alone, but it was significant for both author condition and interaction. Story credibility was significant for gender matching and authorship, but not for interaction. Interest was significant for gender matching and interaction, but not for authorship. H3: Credibility predictors will attenuate the impact of gender cues. The only element that affected men's credibility when the author's gender matched was interest, and this variable was not statistically significant for author condition. In other words, interest determined the credibility of men more thansex. For women, story credibility was affected by both gender appropriateness and authorship, but not by interaction. Paternity was statistically significant at the p < 0.01 level, while gender concordance was significant at the p < 0.05 level. Women relate better to stories written by staff or the public, which present their point of view, but 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 other women more in audience-written stories, while they gave higher interest scores to stories written by women, whether the author was an editor or an audience member. Discussion These results 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 sensitive to gender stereotypes. This was an effort to explore ways to encourage women to participate in citizen journalism, regardless of the content of the story. As Mayhill Fowler demonstrated, female citizen journalists are just as capable of covering politics as they are of chronicling their child's first day of school. What this study suggests is that traditional journalistic definitions of credibility apply to articles written by journalists on traditional media websites. The fact that it is a professionally produced story is a stronger indicator of the story's credibility than gender. Author manipulation had little influence on experiment participants when it came to staff-written stories. It is important in professional news, but the fact that one's gender matches that of audience members does not. is not. This may be what Armstrong and McAdams (2009) predicted when blogs and other forms of user-generated content become more common. What matters then is the expertise and professionalism of the author, not whether he is a man or a woman. Simply attaching this author to a respected news agency engenders trust among men and women. However, for user-generated content, gender stereotypes continue to have some influence, but this influence, for the most part, can be mitigated by the degree of connection a person feels with it. the history and site behind it. Men, for example, found stories written by the public almost as credible as stories written by staff, while they found female editors more credible than male reporters. Women, on the other hand, only felt more connected to writers when they were members of the public. In other words, gender matters less than social presence or the extent to which receivers notice the author behind the study. Men can simply choose information that interests them, regardless of who wrote the story. This represents a rejection of Pearson's early research that male writers are more credible. In fact, this study suggests that men may think that female journalists write more interesting stories. This study to some extent supports the perception that citizen journalism concerns women more than men. Women seek a similar perspective when approaching citizen journalism. They look at other clues when reading.

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