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Collaborate with trusted messengers to reach new audiences
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We’ve been talking about independent creators and news influencers lately. Why? Because many creators are effectively engaging with audiences traditional newsrooms struggle to reach.
As more people turn to independent creators for information, we’re working alongside Liz Kelly Nelson of Project C to help creators clearly communicate their ethics and integrity to their audiences. At the same time, we want to help newsrooms adapt their content and products to better engage people who tune out of the news or feel unplugged from civic life more broadly, as creators have so effectively done.
We’ve been sharing advice for how newsrooms can embrace creator-style content and learn from influencers’ successes, from replicating content creators’ tone and style of reporting news and how they format their content to engage audiences. But another key part of this for newsrooms will be to work alongside and collaborate with like-minded, responsible creators in their communities.
The American Press Institute (API) has been exploring what this looks like on a local news level and recently wrapped up a pilot program where they guided six newsrooms through a 4-month cohort where they worked to collaborate with trusted messengers and influencers in their communities.
API has been rolling out some of their findings from the cohort, which we’re highlighting in today’s trust tip, including some ethical guidelines from our team at Trusting News to help newsrooms get transparent and build trust in these collaborations. (Subscribe to API’s Need to Know newsletter to get updated as these resources publish.)
1. Identify trusted messengers in your area
Who you collaborate with will look different depending on your newsroom’s scope of coverage. As Adriana Lacy writes for API, influencers are often people who “play a key role in bridging the gap between journalism and local communities.” Who are those bridging that gap in your community?
For some communities, these might be more traditional social media influencers — people who have a large following and audience. For newsrooms covering smaller communities, the “influencers” and trusted messengers may be community leaders with prominent voice or sway in the community. Remember it’s not just about who has the largest follower count, but who aligns with your newsroom’s goal and speaks to your community.
Lacy lays out more guidance here on how to find aligned influencers in your area.
2. Envision different ways to collaborate
These collaborations can look many different ways, including paying an influencer to help distribute your newsroom content or actually collaborating on creating content together.
Here’s an example of how LAist did this with creator account LA in a Minute before last November’s election to help get the word out about their voting guide.
As API shares in their guide, the content behind these collaborations can vary and look (and perhaps, should!) different than the journalism content your newsroom typically creates, from simplifying local processes to creating day-in-the-life content of changemakers in your community.
Find a long list of collaboration ideas and story ideas from API here.
3. Get transparent about your ethics
These collaborations may look quite different from partnerships your newsroom has done in the past, so it’s likely you’ll face ethical questions from both the public and newsroom staff. Questions like: How do you know this information is fair and accurate? And how will it impact people’s perception of the independence of our newsroom?
We know many people are skeptical of journalists and don’t automatically assume we’re striving to be fair — that’s why it’s crucial newsrooms get on the record about the ethics behind their work, especially when experimenting with new types of content and partnerships.
In this guide, we share questions to internally ask about the collaboration, red flags to watch out for and a checklist to help you anticipate and prepare for any potentially sticky ethical situations that may arise. We also have sample disclosures you can copy and paste to use when you’re ready to go public with a collaboration.
Check out the full ethics guide here.
We’re here to help!
This is new territory for many local newsrooms, so our Trusting News team is here to help support you along the way.
If you have questions, or concerns or want help brainstorming what these collaborations could look like for your news organization, hit “reply” and let us know!
Or if this is something your newsroom is already working on, we’d love to see examples or hear more about it.
At Trusting News, we learn how people decide what news to trust and turn that knowledge into actionable strategies for journalists. We train and empower journalists to take responsibility for demonstrating credibility and actively earning trust through transparency and engagement. Learn more about our work, vision and team. Subscribe to our Trust Tips newsletter. Follow us on Twitter, BlueSky and LinkedIn.
Project manager Mollie Muchna (she/her) has spent the last 10 years working in audience and engagement journalism in local newsrooms across the Southwest. She lives in Tucson, Arizona, where she is also an adjunct professor at the University of Arizona’s School of Journalism. She can be reached at mollie@trustingnews.org and on Twitter @molliemuchna.
