Trusting News receives $250,000 grant from Knight Foundation

Published on November 22, 2024November 26, 2024 by Trusting News | Reading Time: 3 minutes

The Trusting News team has received a $250,000 general operating grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation in support of its work with journalists. 

This investment comes as Trusting News is starting a new chapter as an independent nonprofit. The team will continue to evolve its coaching and training programs, develop partnerships with researchers and other support organizations, and stay true to its mission of inspiring and empowering journalists to actively earn trust. Upcoming work will include research and training in these key focus areas:

Upcoming work will include research and training in these key focus areas:

• Polarization and news avoidance: Coverage of government and the relationship between trust, polarization and news avoidance (including through the Advancing Democracy initiative, a partnership with Hearken and Solutions Journalism)
• Avoiding newsroom echo chambers: How newsroom cultures, routines and conversations can continually invite and explore diverse perspectives, in service of more nuanced, complex coverage
• Engagement and listening: Pushing newsrooms to invest in learning from and building relationships with people who have low trust in the news or actively avoid the news
• Creator journalists: How journalists building audiences independently on platforms like Substack, YouTube and TikTok can signal credibility and help the public find responsible information in noisy environments
• Trust and technology: Research and training around how newsrooms can evolve their use of technology to build earning trust more seamlessly into their routines, and to model responsible use of technology to their communities

The work is all driven by the team’s foundational beliefs:

• Communities need access to news that reflects their diverse lives and values and is responsive to their priorities and feedback. 
• Listening and humility should be central to how journalists operate. 
• It’s up to journalists to invest in telling the story of what makes their own work valuable and trustworthy.

About the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation

We are social investors who support democracy by funding free expression and journalism, arts and culture in community, research in areas of media and democracy, and the success of American cities and towns where the Knight brothers once had newspapers.

Background

Trusting News was incubated in 2016 at the Reynolds Journalism Institute at the Missouri School of Journalism. In 2019, the project became co-hosted by RJI and the American Press Institute. It spun off as an independent nonprofit in 2024.

The core staff of Trusting News is founder and executive director Joy Mayer; Lynn Walsh, who has been with the project since its second year, in 2017; and Mollie Muchna, who joined in 2019.

Joining Mayer and Walsh on the inaugural board of directors are Andrew DeVigal, director of the Agora Journalism Center at the University of Oregon, Reuben Stern, director of the Missouri School of Journalism’s New York program, and Richard T. Griffiths, retired head of CNN’s editorial quality control team. Additions to the board will be made in 2025.

New to Trusting News, or looking to engage further?

• Get started earning trust with Trust Kits
• Sign up for the weekly Trust Tips newsletter
• Learn about the impact of Trusting News through newsroom case studies, research and journalists’ testimonials

Interested in becoming a funding partner?

The Trusting News team is actively fundraising to support its research and programming. With ideas or questions about funding Trusting News, email joy@TrustingNews.org.