ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Commun.
Sec. Media Governance and the Public Sphere
Volume 10 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fcomm.2025.1675693
Modeling Jordanian Audience Engagement and News Credibility in the Digital Media Era: A PLS-SEM Approach
Provisionally accepted
- Zarqa University, Zarqa, Jordan
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The rise of digital news has changed the landscape of news consumption, particularly in emerging media contexts. This study investigated how members of the Jordanian audience use digital news coverage while exploring the effects of Trust in Digital News (TND) and Social Media Use (SMU) on Audience Engagement (AE) and Perceived News Credibility (PNC). The study employed a two-step methodological approach: In order to inform our first hypotheses, we examined the evolution of digital media research using bibliometric mapping. Subsequently, we used PLS-SEM to assess the survey data collected from 1,200 respondents. This study finds that TND has a significant positive effect on AE (β = 0.45, p < 0.001) and PNC (β = 0.28, p < 0.01). Furthermore, while SMU had a positive and significant effect on AE (β = 0.32, p < 0.01), it only had a weakly significant effect on PNC (β = 0.15, p = 0.051). In essence, AE is significantly positively associated with PNC (β = 0.56, p < 0.001), which signals an important mediating impact on public trust of digital journalism. There are many important implications of this research for media practitioners and policy makers attempting to stimulate informed democratic, trustful public discourse in an algorithm-mediated environment filled with information overload.
Keywords: Digital Media, Public behaviour, News coverage, PLS-SEM, Jordanian Audience, bibliometric analysis, News credibility, Audience engagement
Received: 29 Jul 2025; Accepted: 30 Sep 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Almashaqbeh. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Yousef Almashaqbeh, yalmashaqbeh@zu.edu.jo
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