Younger readers who find low-quality news videos on a newspaper website see the news organization as less credible and lacking in value. So newspapers have to be cautious because even a few low-quality news videos on their websites might damage their well-intended effort to attract a younger audience.
Gina Masullo Chen and Peter S. Chen of University of Texas at Austin, Chen-Wei Chang of Fudan University and Zainul Abedin of University of Southern Mississippi conducted an online experiment with 212 college-age news consumers.
The results showed that younger news consumers can detect quality differences in news videos and this leads them to value high-quality videos over low-quality videos. Those exposed to low-quality videos saw them as lacking in technical value as well as subjective value, a measure of how much they enjoyed, liked and felt engaged by the videos. The researchers also found that people exposed to low-quality videos had a diminished view of both the credibility and the value of the newspaper that produced the videos.
To read the full text of the study: . Chen, G. M., Chen, P. S., Chang, C. W., & Abedin, Z. (2017). News video quality affects online sites’ credibility. Newspaper Research Journal, 38(1), 19-31.