Trust isn’t something journalists can assume or demand — it has to be earned every day. For 10 years, Trusting News has worked alongside journalists and researchers to develop strategies to make journalists’ integrity and credibility more transparent and to build engagement and listening into news processes and products.
As we look ahead to our next chapter, we’re focused on turning what we’ve learned into lasting change across the industry. Guided by Little Key Consulting in a six-month strategic planning process, we’ve refined our approach and established key strategic priorities.
Why we do this work
All people deserve information that’s responsive to their needs, helps them navigate their communities, and reflects their diverse priorities and values. In an era of content overwhelm, confusion, and fatigue, responsible journalists must demonstrate — transparently and consistently — why they’re worthy of trust. Doing so is essential not just to their public service mission, but to their business sustainability.
We’ll know we’re succeeding when:
- Journalists are compelled to adopt trust-building strategies in service of sustainable, public-service information.
- Our training and coaching are easily accessed, understood, customized, and adopted by information providers across roles and platforms.
- The public can more easily navigate the information ecosystem and differentiate responsible, ethical, accurate information.
This work depends on having sufficient knowledge and evidence about what actually builds trust with news audiences — which is why research is one of our core strategies, not just a supporting activity.
We do this because we believe
- Communities need news that reflects their diverse lives and values and responds to their priorities and feedback.
- Listening and humility should be central to how journalists operate.
- It’s up to information providers to invest in telling the story of what makes their own work valuable and trustworthy.
How we got here
Our theory of change points to four strategies that are core to our approach:
- Training and resources for information providers in how to demonstrate credibility and actively earn trust
- One-on-one support and coaching for journalists and news leaders
- Thought leadership that urges the industry to be more responsive to the public’s needs
- Research into audience needs and perceptions
Over the next three years, here’s how we’re putting those strategies into actions.
Our strategic priorities
1. Turn our strategies into an industry standard
We’ve spent a decade developing practical, journalist-tested, research-backed strategies for earning trust in journalism. Our next challenge is widespread adoption: making sure these aren’t just our best practices, but the industry’s. Whether journalists come through our programs or have never heard of us, we want industry standards to include the strategies we know work.
That means packaging our programming into a more cohesive, accessible set of offerings — with clearer starting points for different beats, roles, and challenges. It also means putting technology to work for us. We’ll develop tools to help scale access to our resources, so more newsrooms can put trust-building strategies into practice, faster. And we’ll build on our partnerships with other industry organizations, so wherever journalists turn for support, they’ll learn from what we’ve learned.
2. Help news leaders invest in earning trust
Real change in a newsroom doesn’t come from good intentions alone — it comes from leadership. Trust has to be built into how organizations set priorities, hire, train, and hold themselves accountable.
We’re listening first: assessing what news leaders actually need and reshaping our existing resources around that. Then we’ll roll out new offerings designed specifically for decision-makers. Through research and programming, we’ll also invest in tying trust more directly to the bottom line. We know financial sustainability is top of mind for anyone steering a journalism ship. And while it’s common sense that trust is key to audience retention and growth, leaders need more data in order to prioritize new strategies. Expect to see new, ongoing research that keeps our understanding of public trust current.
3. Helping journalists practice humility
Too often, journalists respond to public criticism with defensiveness instead of curiosity. It’s an understandable instinct — journalists see their work as essential and ethical, and it’s easy to assume the trust problem lies elsewhere. But that response prevents journalists from delivering news in ways that are accessible to and hearable by people outside their existing audience. And it keeps the gap between newsrooms and the people they serve from closing.
We’re committed to changing that. We’ll keep journalists regularly informed about what the public actually thinks, how news consumption feels from the outside, and how to reach people who feel misunderstood and neglected by journalists. We’ll build on our industry-leading work on the ethical use of AI, grounded in real understanding of public knowledge and skepticism. We’ll continue our support for creator journalists and build industry understanding of how people navigate news on social platforms. And we’re continuing our commitment — born in 2020 — to help journalists communicate in ways that resonate across the political spectrum.
4. Building our own capacity and resilience
After 10 years, we’re ready to build the internal foundation that lets us operate with bigger ambition. We have secured our first multi-year funding commitment and are eager to build on that and execute a bolder vision.
That means creating clearer systems for newsrooms to request our support, better tools for tracking our impact, and an honest look at what our team needs to grow. It also means building a more resilient, diverse funding model, so we can operate from strength rather than scarcity — and finally, growing our own capacity so we can meet the full scope of what we believe is possible.
How you can help
We can’t do this work alone. Our 10 years of work so far has been made possible by the journalists who have been willing to change alongside us, the researchers who have tested our approach, and the funders who have made the work possible. Our team would love to hear from you at info@TrustingNews.org.
Subscribe and stay in touch: If you’re a journalist, make sure you’re subscribed to our Trust Tips newsletter so you can keep up to date about our goals and plans. And hit reply when something gets you thinking or spurs you to action. You know how you feel when you hear constructively from your audience — about the impact of your work or even if if they’re making suggestions for improvement? That’s how we feel about hearing from you. As we measure our own impact, the change we’ve helped you create is a key data point. We also stay laser focused on the challenges you’re actually facing, and we need to understand your needs thoroughly. Please stay in touch.
Collaborate with us: If you’re also working to evolve journalism’s practices and support the public’s access to responsible news and information, we would love to be in touch. We are in a continual cycle of learning and training, and we do it all in public, with evolving, open-source resources and a collaborative spirit. We appreciate opportunities to work with networks of newsrooms and communities of journalists, and we’re always interested in how what we’re doing could be more efficient or have more impact.
Financially back the work: If you financially support the public’s ability to stay informed and believe responsible information is key to healthy communities — and to democracy — we’d welcome a conversation about how we might partner. While some news organizations are able to pay for customized training and coaching, less than 10 percent of our revenue comes from journalists. We are committed to making our public-interest resources available to anyone, including journalists who are struggling to stay in business and don’t have the luxury of paying for support.
If you are in a position to donate to support our work, please do that here.