Alyssa AppelmanUniversity of Kansas | KU · William Allen White School of Journalism and Mass Communications
Alyssa Appelman
Ph.D. in Mass Communications
About
36
Publications
8,971
Reads
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Citations
Introduction
Alyssa specializes in news accuracy and credibility. She tests the effects of journalistic norms and practices on readers. She has conducted projects on the effects of grammatical errors, stylistic errors and factual errors in news articles. More broadly, she’s interested in the effects of message characteristics in digital and social media.
Publications
Publications (36)
Despite calls to conceptualize credibility as three separate concepts—source credibility, message credibility, and media credibility—there exists no scale that exclusively measures message credibility. To address this gap, the current study constructs and validates a new scale. Results from a confirmatory factor analysis suggest that message credib...
Using four between-subjects experiments (N1 = 106, N2 = 166, N3 = 159, and N4 = 164), this project tests the ways audiences process grammatical errors in news articles. In all, results suggest that readers perceive stories with grammatical errors to be lower in quality, credibility, and informativeness, but the number of errors needed is relatively...
Through a content analysis and survey, this project explores the prevalence and clarity of acronyms in news headlines. Acronyms popular in a local newspaper were largely unknown to a sample of target readers. When asked about their reactions to unfamiliar published acronyms, about half said they would try to figure it out, and about one-third expre...
With most Internet users now getting news from social media, there is growing concern about how to verify the content that appears on these platforms. Two experiments tested the effects of fact-checking labels (confirmed vs. disputed) by source (peer vs. third-party) on credibility, virality, and information seeking of news posted on social media....
This survey examines job satisfaction of U.S. copy editors, proofreaders, and fact-checkers ( N = 472). Participants across media fields (e.g., newspapers, magazines, and books) reported high job satisfaction, high perceptions of work quality, low role overload, and low burnout. They reported high satisfaction with their schedules, but they were mo...
This experiment ( N = 300) tests the effects of numbers and math errors in online news articles. Several readers struggled to recall and recognize the numbers and math errors in the articles, but there were significant effects of thinking they saw them—Regardless of experimental condition, readers who noticed (or imagined) numbers reported higher c...
Social media play an important role in political communication, leading to growing concerns about the credibility of shared information. Attempts to slow the spread of misinformation by platforms such as Facebook and Twitter include adding fact-checking labels to social media posts, the effectiveness of which remains unclear. Using two experiments,...
This project examines news coverage of public opinion polls and explores whether journalists and readers are familiar with best practices in this domain. Study 1 tests the effects of related errors on readers’ perceptions, and Study 2 asks journalists to reflect upon this kind of coverage. Readers (N = 495) only noticed errors when they were very f...
Journalistic codes of ethics (N = 88) from 55 countries were analyzed for their discussions of errors and corrections. The sample includes codes from press councils, broadcast media outlets, newspapers, digital media outlets, radio stations and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Overall, the codes were similar across countries. Most included a...
Through two experiments (N1 = 131, N 2 = 520), this study looks at whether the negative effects of acronyms and abbreviations in headlines are based on their presence or their difficulty. In all, it finds support for a difficulty effect; people had lower content and source perceptions when they were shown a headline with unfamiliar acronym(s) compa...
A between-subjects experiment (N = 386) explores the effects of correction features and reader investment on perceptions of online news content. In all, the findings suggest a strong influence of news outlet reputation. Participants paid more attention to the news outlet and the correction when they read from the online-exclusive publication (i.e.,...
Exploring reputation and organizational communication, this study tests how journalists perceive press releases containing grammatical errors. Journalists (n = 118) read a press release with or without errors from an existing or unknown company. Journalists ranked the press releases without errors more favorably, regardless of their perceptions of...
The codebook for analyzing newspaper corrections has remained nearly unchanged since 1936. This project sought to create and validate a new codebook. Study 1 analyzed a previous application of the original codebook and proposed a new version, which Study 2 and Study 3 then applied and tested. In both, the new codebook resulted in fewer underused ca...
Twitter has emerged as a key news source, but questions remain about the ethics of relying on it as a source and the implications of such reliance for audience impressions. Two experiments test perceptions of news attributed to Twitter. Study 1 (N = 699) tests the effects of quoting from Twitter and showing actual tweets. The results suggest minima...
A content analysis of corrections (N = 507) from four influential newspapers—the New York Times, the Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times—shows that they correct errors similar to each other in terms of location, type, impact and objectivity. Results are interpreted through democratic theory and are used to suggest way...
In a between-subjects experiment (N = 88), participants who read about the “FreshVeg, Inc. tomato crisis” were more likely to say they lost confidence in the product than were participants who read about the “tomato crisis.” Interestingly, similar results were not seen regarding confidence in the company or other corporate perceptions. Overall, thi...
This study examined the relationship between women’s stereotypes and their perceptions of gendered news stories, specifically about stay-at-home parenthood. A between-subjects experiment with undergraduate women revealed that participants with stereotypes about women thought a news story about a stay-at-home mother was more typical than one about a...
Corrections of errors in a news story are perceived as most important when they do not repeat the error or attribute blame. Additionally, blaming the error on the source leads to lower liking of that source.
A previous study found that college newspapers have perceived levels of credibility on par with their professional counterparts, but suggested that quality could be assessed in other ways. Previous research has documented the potential for error corrections to increase perceptions of quality. In a content analysis of College Media Association membe...
This study of types of corrections in newspapers finds that readers consider objective, high-impact corrections more important than errors that are objective and low-impact. The findings do not directly support previous research that suggested corrections help foster credibility.
Journalistic editing has remained fairly constant over time, despite ongoing changes to the media landscape. Traditional skills are still taught to journalism students and still employed in traditional newsrooms. This study sought to determine the psychological effect of journalistic writing conventions on modern audiences. Through the paradigm of...
This content analysis of The New York Times corrections found that the majority were for errors in people’s names, titles, non-age numbers and dates. Most originated in the Features and Lifestyies and the National News sections and were assessed to have little impact on society. © 2014 Newspaper and Online News Division of the Association for Educa...
This study examines the effects of grammatical errors on the credibility of news stories and the amount of time and effort required to read them. Such errors increase reading difficulty and lower readers' perception of credibility as well as what they can recall..
This study considers the impact of grammatical errors on cognitive processing and subsequent evaluation of news articles. It begins with an examination of the Elaboration Likelihood Model, the Heuristic-Systematic Processing Model, and grammar-related research. An experiment then tests the impact of grammatical errors on
measures of cognitive proce...