Trust Me

THE SEARCHERS

Part of the work was technical, and part of it involved solving problems with design: If you’re adhering to these standards, how do you present that in the digital sphere—on your site or with individual stories?

Some outlets already disclose information included in the Trust Indicators. But the new system standardizes this information across the industry, making it easier for both the public and news distribution platforms to find it.

Roland Freund, deputy editor-in-chief for Germany’s dpa, notes that the agency already provides detailed supplementary information to its customers—news organizations— for stories it covers. “In the future these details will be displayed to internet users as part of the Trust Project,” he says. “Everyone will be able to benefit from this transparency, because good journalism is about being trustworthy.”

Given the platforms through which people find news today, the Trust Project effort includes social media and search engine players as external partners. Call it a bridge between newsrooms and technology companies. So at the same time that news sites are bolstering their transparency through the Trust Indicators, digital platforms aim to incorporate them into the way they display news stories.

Here’s how the indicators work under the hood: Each indicator is signaled in the article and site code, providing the first standardized technical language for platforms to learn more from news sites about the quality and expertise behind journalists’ work. Google, Facebook, Bing, and Twitter have all agreed to use the indicators and are investigating and piloting ideas about how to best to use them to surface and display quality journalism.

COMING TO YOU LIVE

The rollout didn’t just happen online. The Newseum in Washington, D.C., hosted a Trust Project event in November 2017 on “Rebuilding Trust in Journalism.” And in December, the Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose hosted a West Coast rollout on “The Trust Project: Using Technology To Restore Faith in the News.” Among those joining Lehrman for those programs were Richard Gingras, vice president of news for Google; Cory Haik, publisher of Mic; Devin Slater, design director for The Globe and Mail; and Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist.

Newmark was an early and key backer of the Trust Project through his philanthropic fund. He approaches the project not as a professional journalist but as someone who wants journalism to do the important work of helping us understand complex and urgent issues, and to foster informed debate.

“I’m a news consumer, not a news professional,” he has said. “I just want news I can trust.” And, as he told Storyful, “News consumers need a way to tell media companies what we expect from them, the types of news we can count on and will pay for. The Trust Indicators set standards for media outlets and allow newspeople to commit to good faith reporting that’s worth buying.”

Along with funding from Craig Newmark Philanthropies, the Trust Project has received financial backing from Google, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Democracy Fund, and the Markkula Foundation.

NO SILVER BULLET

Despite the broad involvement of leaders in journalism, it’s fair to say that nobody thinks the Trust Project offers a silver bullet. Other efforts in the media ecosphere come at trust from different angles. Take the Open Brand Safety framework, launched in 2017 with the goal of researching sites that traffic in fake news and hate speech—and helping advertisers steer clear. Or there’s the Hamilton 68 Dashboard, which tracks content tweeted by Russian bots and trolls; backed by the German Marshall Fund, it is named for one of the Federalist Papers in which Alexander Hamilton warned against foreign meddling in U.S. elections.

Who is the audience for the Trust Project? Based on the years of interviewing, Lehrman breaks down news users into four broad categories. First, there is what she calls the “avid news user”: someone who actively seeks out quality news with solid reporting, and is willing to put in extra effort to make sure stories hold up—including cross-checking with different sources. After that, the user might push a story out through various social networks.

Not everyone has the time, energy, or desire to do their own investigation, though. So one notch below is what Lehrman describes as the “engaged user.” This is someone who still wants solid news—though perhaps they’re a bit overwhelmed by the cacophony of what is presented as news today.

Third, there is a user who is a bit less engaged. They don’t so much pursue the news as “let the news wash over them,” as Lehrman puts it. That’s understandable—there’s so much out there. And they might find themselves, as one study by the Center for Media Engagement at University of Texas at Austin puts it, “befuddled and distrustful.”

Finally, there is a user who is “actively angry and disengaged.” That’s a description that seems to speak to the tenor of our times. And Lehrman recognizes the valid reasons behind some of that disengagement. “Some members of the public are frustrated with journalism that seems thin, uninformed, biased against their community and replete with argument, anger, and violence,” she wrote for The Atlantic. “They complain about opinion presented exactly like news … They want more humility from journalists, more recognition that in spite of journalists’ best aspirations, we do sometimes get it wrong.”

The participants of the Trust Project have begun their work with the first couple types of users in mind—those actively seeking out trustworthy news. They hope that these users, leveraging social networks, can then, as Lehrman says, flip the picture—and bring along members of the third group—folks who more or less let the news wash over them. As for convincing the angry and disengaged? That’s a tough row to hoe.

Lehrman understands that it is also natural for journalists and news organizations to ask: If they’re now expected to provide more information and background and are already pressed for time, how can they possibly manage this, too? As editors look at pinched staff resources, and publishers eye the bottom line, they want to know: How are we going to pay for this?

Part of an answer to that is that some Trust Indicators are implemented at a site level, then carried with every story. And part of an answer, project participants hoped, would lie in the development of new digital tools for journalists to show indicators efficiently. With that in mind, the Trust Project convened a group of designers in a problem-solving effort hosted at the Washington Post. And they came together with a sense of doing far more than designing visual widgets. As Lehrman recounted in her recent Storyful conversation: “These designers started thinking about, ‘Well, how do we turn something like this process of adding more information about your sources into one that actually benefits the reporting process?’ They started thinking about things like creating a tool that would enable journalists to show their sources and also start building a better database of who their sources are and what kind of documents they’ve used. There are creative ways that you can take this idea of a transparency tool and actually enhance the reporting process as well.”

In other words, the efforts to pull back the curtain on journalism through Trust Indicators shouldn’t just make for more transparent stories. They should lead to better journalism.

David Walmsley, editor-in-chief of The Globe and Mail, explained to online magazine OZY why his paper felt compelled to be a part of the Trust Project. “For far too long, we have sat there and said, ‘Let the story speak for itself,’” he said. “Then we leave this vacuum, and it’s whoever speaks loudest gets heard.”

Lehrman is optimistic that social media and search platforms will continue to amplify the value of the Trust Project. “Google was involved from the very beginning,” she notes. “Facebook has come in, Twitter is involved.” They are experimenting with ways to display the Trust Indicators to flag that the stories are from a source that has committed to trustworthy reporting—or not.

At the same time, Lehrman doesn’t expect platforms to solve the problem for news users. Nor does she want the Trust Project to give any news partners a free pass. Fundamentally, she says, we don’t want people blindly trusting the news media. Instead, both journalism and society at large are better served when people look to the media and read and watch and listen with skepticism—but at the same time, they look to it with the goal and the expectation of becoming more informed.

One way of thinking about the Trust Indicators is like nutrition labels for news, Lehrman says. Not everyone will look. But for those who want to know what they’re consuming, there are now standards—and the info is now available.

Since this effort is called the Trust Project, it’s helpful to remember how trust actually works among human beings. As Lehrman recently noted in an interview with OZY, “It’s not about convincing people to trust you. It’s about earning their trust.”

READ MORE about the Trust Project at thetrustproject.org.

STEVEN BOYD SAUM is the editor of Santa Clara Magazine.

DEBORAH LOHSE is assistant director of media and internal communications at SCU. She was previously a staff journalist at the Mercury News, Wall Street Journal, and Money Magazine.

FRANZISKA BARCZYK is an illustrator, art director, and GIF maker whose work has been featured by Walrus Magazine, Advertising Age, and NPR.