| As digital cosmopolitans increasingly become an important audience to satisfy, internet journalism must adapt to the cosmopolitan audience, learning what this audience trusts in order to increase readership and revenues. This dissertation uses qualitative research in the form of interviews to explore the life-worlds of 12 digital cosmopolitans to discover what kinds of news sources digital cosmopolitans trust and how they make decisions about what is trustworthy in online news.Coded content analysis was also conducted on this small sample to provide a quantitative data-based overview of the sample populations'opinions. To frame this research, this dissertation also explores the rise of the cosmopolitan audience through literature review, demonstrating that the internet provides the next great cosmopolitan frontier and making it critically important for internet journalists to meet cosmopolitan standards.The main findings are that digital cosmopolitans most trust large private news agencies and government owned news agencies (outside China) to create reliable content in online journalism. The basis for their trust is found in a perceived lack of bias, a staff of expert journalists, the ability of the public to monitor the news and point out errors, and ties to a country with perceived democratic values. Digital cosmopolitans do not seem to trust news if it comes from a news source lacking democratic values, lacking an expert staff, or if the source is perceived as too financially motivated. |
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