"But a new working paper suggests there's a silver lining for trusted news organizations: they may be able to benefit from the broader degradation of the information ecosystem and win over subscribers concerned about sifting through the slop on their own. Filipe Campante, Bloomberg distinguished professor at Johns Hopkins University, was reading coverage about deep fakes and fake news in the lead-up to the election last year when he conceived of this field experiment."
"Hagemeister is a data scientist at the large German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ). SZ is considered center-left in the country, comparable to, say, The New York Times in the U.S. or the Guardian in the U.K. With a daily paid circulation of 260,000 and nearly 300,000 online subscribers as of 2024, it's the most widely sold broadsheet daily newspaper in the country."
Increasing prevalence of AI-generated misinformation raises the potential value of verified, trustworthy news. An economist hypothesized that scarcity of trustworthiness would increase willingness to pay for reliable news. Academics collaborated with a large German broadsheet to test that hypothesis using an online field experiment. Visitors to the newspaper website were offered a pop-up picture quiz while subscribers received an email link. Participants answered questions about trust in news and social platforms and were shown image pairs to assess authenticity. The experiment aimed to measure whether difficulty distinguishing real from fake increases subscription demand.
Read at Nieman Lab
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