Succulent Sins, Personalized Politics, and Mainstream Media’s Tabloidization Temptation

Abstract

This study uses an experiment to analyze how mainstream journalism’s use of tabloid writing techniques affects online credibility. Participants read four news stories and rated their credibility using McCroskey’s Source Credibility Scale. Participants found stories written with a tabloid style less credible than more traditional stories. Tabloidized soft news stories were more credible than tabloidized hard news stories. Results suggest that online news media may damage their credibility by using tabloidized writing techniques to increase readership. Furthermore, participants were less likely to enjoy stories written in a tabloidized style. An application of act utilitarianism suggests that tabloidization is an unethical method for increasing news readership.