Yes, the crime scene tape makes a difference

Does it matter how you spend your news resources on story presentation? Yes (with an asterisk*), and here's a nice crosstown comparison from this morning's visit to the newsstand-with-cat-photos that is Facebook to suggest why.

The texts are fairly similar. The passive voice should still be preferred by the crime reporter, ledewise, but both of these are better than "At approximately 11:32 p.m., police responded to a report of shots fired ...". Our interest, though, is in the images: the site itself vs. the stock shot of "crime scene" tape (or flashing lights on the roof a police car). Leaving aside what AI might think, how does this choice affect your audience's -- or potential audience's -- evaluation of your work?

My favorite takeway is that the real image makes people think the writing is better. (No, really.) There are positive effects on perceptions of credibility and objectivity (a marginal p=.069 on the latter) too. In short, the extra time spent distinguishing the specific crime story at hand from all the other potential crime stories out there makes people think your work is better.

This doesn't have to mean sending a photographer along, or even reminding the reporter which way to hold the smartphone for best results. It can be as simple as pulling a map from Google -- from which, as above, a street-level view is sometimes available too. (One of the stories in this study used a Google map in teh "real"condition.)

Now for the *asterisk: The audience is a moving target. Professional socialization can be one factor. In the student sample used in this study, communicaction majors (most of them with at least some journalism coursework) assigned higher credibility to traditional fact-forward headlines; other majors assigned higher credibility to clickbait headlines. In more recent studies, platform choices appear to make a difference; Insta users might have different credibility expectations than TikTok users, and heavy users different than lighter ones. If the "news finds me" phenomenon -- you don't need to visit a news site every morning, because if something is important, one of your friends/follows will post it where you can see it -- is partly a factor of age, then age will contunue to play a part in expectations.

So we can't rule out the idea that at some point, the river will start to run backwards on the assessment of images. A big chunk of the audience might decide that it's not a real crime story unless it has an image of crime scene tape. I'd like to think not, but one thing we know for sure about the audience of the future is that they aren't going to call and ask me what I think.

With all that said, and in the sure and certain knowledge that the audience does not give the south end of a northbound rat about your editing instructor's favorite obscure AP style rule -- it never hurts to give the text a final look before you hit the button. Autocorrect, after all, might be making the sublimely rational decision that, if some act or function can be half-assed by the doer, then bare "assed" must be a legit verb form too.