Trusting News inspires and empowers journalists to take responsibility for listening with humility, demonstrating their credibility and actively earning trust.
Trust is earned through engagement: The public is overwhelmed and confused by the information ecosystem and not sure how to determine what's trustworthy. We equip journalists to be in continual conversation with the people they aim to serve and to bring feedback loops into staff decision-making. Trust is most effectively built when it is responding to a deep understanding of the causes of mistrust.
Trust is earned through transparency: Journalists need to actively earn trust, not expect or demand it. We walk journalists through how and where to explain the elements of their credibility, ethics and integrity. Any place people are consuming our content, we have an opportunity for them also to learn about how and why we do what we do. And any decisions that we don't talk about publicly are invisible to the audience.
Trust is earned through humility: Every journalist could spend more time learning about the people they're not reaching. Newsroom teams are too homogenous and are often too isolated from people who see the world through a lens that is different from the staff's. And too much news is designed for news junkies rather than people who have a more casual or sporadic relationship to information. If we produce news for people who think like us and consume the news like we do, we cannot claim to be providing a widespread public service.
Trust Kits break down big strategies into step-by-step guides for journalists ready to explain their work and engage with their communities.
Target Issues
We have a continually evolving slate of training programs and cohorts meant to guide journalists through specific trust-building topics and strategies. Some cohorts are paid.
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We will customize support for individual journalists or newsroom teams on any challenge related to trust-building and audience relationships (sometimes paid after a free conversation, and sometimes subsidized by existing funding).
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We partner with journalists and with academic researchers to be continually learning about audience perceptions of news and the effectiveness of trust-building strategies.
Target Issues