Empirical study on trust enhancement behaviour of Bulgarian traditional and online news media

Abstract

The topic of trust has been investigated for many years by the scholars, each one of them adding new perspective, new model, new definition in terms to explain the complicated structure of trust. Widely agreed is that the definition of trust is somehow vague. Other shortcoming of the existing literature is that any definition given to trust if general, is outdated (doesnt take in consideration the changed environment of digitalization), or if specified – it is specified mostly in terms of online commerce. For those reasons the existing literature is saturated, making some topics among researchers like online commerce, most favourable than others. The current research will try to improve the existing literature through providing: firstly, new definition of the trust in digital environment, secondly - propose model for measuring the digital trust in one specific institution that is media, focusing on news media and possible willingnes to pay for news contents, and thirdly – will suggest applicable policies for digital news providers in term that they will be able to enhance the trust with which their consumers are granting the information provided by news providers. Focused population of the research is Bulgarian society as recently many world organizations dealing with trust in press are indicating constantly decreasing trust in media. The topic is found to be important as the globalization and digitalization is making it easier than ever before to consume and to create news. Misleading information in some cases can be harmful for its consumers. Since the ease of producing of news is observed the trust granted to different types of news providers and sources are tremendously different. The research has following structure: chapter first provides basic introduction of the research problem, chapter two considers existing literature and discuss it in terms to clarify research problem and suggest new definition of trust in digital environment, chapter three propose new model for measuring trust in online news providers as one of the main institutions touching the trust in the society in comparison with traditional media, data collection and research methodology, chapter four discuss application of the proposed model, applied methodology as well as accessed results, chapter five discuss general findings and conclusion of the findings.