Lara Zapata’s research while affiliated with University of Zaragoza and other places

This study explores how news authorship, exclusiveness, and media type affect readers' paying intent for digital contents. A web-based experiment involving 602 Spanish adults reveals that authorship (prestigious journalist), exclusiveness, and media type (legacy media and new media over unknown media) increase readers' economic value assessments of online news. In addition, our results show that the interaction between authorship and media type is affected by the level of news exclusiveness: when an online article is written by a prestigious journalist and is exclusive, readers' heuristic assessments of its economic value are biased toward new media over legacy ones, and thus privilege the former and penalize the latter in their pecuniary evaluations. These results might point to a change in readers' consumption patterns, favoring the brand values, and news production processes of new media over legacy ones.