Julia Angwin:

Journalism is facing a trust crisis. Audiences are increasingly skeptical that mainstream media serves their interests and are turning their attention away from traditional news outlets. Meanwhile, online content creators who engage in journalist-style work are building huge, loyal audiences that eclipse those of traditional media.

This shift in attention can be attributed, in part, to the different types of relationships that journalists and creators have with their audiences. This paper examines these relationships through the lens of trustworthiness. The paper considers three key elements — ability, benevolence, and integrity — that must be present for trust to exist in a relationship.

What we find is that individual creators often work hard to demonstrate ability, benevolence, and integrity to build trust with their audiences. They narrate their expertise, respond to reader questions or suggestions, and interact with their critics — all tactics that help build trust.

News institutions have put less effort into building trustworthy relationships with audiences, and journalists at large institutions do not always have the license to engage independently with audiences in ways that could increase trust. In addition, journalists’ interests are not always aligned with their employers, and they sometimes have a hard time overcoming the trust issues that audiences have with their employers.

This does not mean that journalists are inherently less trustworthy. In fact, you could make a strong case that journalists are more trustworthy because of institutional guardrails, but those guardrails are often internal processes that are not exposed to the public. Meanwhile, creators who often have fewer internal guardrails have built more external-facing practices that help establish trust.