Most readers in dark when bylines differ from staff writer;taglines do little to help

Abstract

An experiment was conducted to determine whether perceptions of the newspaper and story differed by byline type. The findings not only indicate few participants know a story is native advertising, they rarely know the writer except a staff writer. Thus, perceptions mainly differed little. Other bylines were not detailed enough for readers to fully know the writer’s identity, and few read to the tagline. Stronger measures were recommended to fully inform readers about the writer.

Keywords

native advertising experiment ethics public relations taglines readership

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