The Future of Trustworthy Information
Hi friends --
2024 was a devastating year for the journalism industry. Revenues collapsed, newsrooms shrank and failed, social media algorithms became increasingly hostile to news, and audiences fled legacy media for greener pastures.
As media scholar Alice Marwick recently observed: “The 2024 election showed just how irrelevant mainstream news coverage is outside the beltway and chattering class. A big chunk of Americans ignore news completely, or get it sporadically from TikTok, X, or YouTube.”
But that doesn’t mean that the most important work of journalism – holding power to account - stopped happening.
We are now in a world where many people who are not journalists are performing journalist-style accountability work. Consider the video podcasters who asked hard questions of the presidential candidates, or the TikTokers who did deep dives on the GOP’s Project 2025 policy blueprint.
I believe journalists should learn from these trends, not fight them. So I have spent the past year as a Walter Shorenstein Media & Democracy Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School investigating how content creators build trust with their audiences.
This week, I published the results of my inquiries in a report: “The Future of Trustworthy Information: Learning from Online Content Creators.” In it, I compare how journalists and creators approach the three key components of trustworthiness: Ability, Benevolence and Integrity.
“What emerges most clearly from this comparison of journalists and creators is that journalism has placed many markers of trust in institutional processes that are opaque to audiences, while creators try to embed the markers of trust directly in their interactions with audiences,” I wrote.
In other words, journalists assume their audiences trust them, and creators do not. Thus creators put more work into building trust with their audiences. Here’s a few examples:
Ability. Journalists are rarely specialized. Occasionally there will be a doctor covering medicine, or a lawyer covering legal issues, but even when they have expertise, they are not generally allowed to use it explicitly in their reporting – they still must quote outside experts. By comparison, creators often stick to an area of expertise and cite their credentials frequently.
Benevolence. Creators demonstrate benevolence by interacting with their audiences, soliciting ideas from them, and focusing on information that is helpful to their audiences. By comparison, journalists reporting agendas are often set by their bosses at large for-profit companies rather than by interactions with their audiences.
Integrity. Creators and their audiences also hold each other accountable in meaningful ways in the comments section, and in creating videos critiquing or responding to each others’ work. Journalists have cut back on many such forms of accountability, getting rid of comment sections and public editors.
These lessons in trust are not just theoretical. I have also used them to inform the development of the nonprofit journalism studio Proof News that I launched earlier this year.
To demonstrate ability, Proof explicitly partners with experts, whether it is with a TikTok Black history creator using our AI testing tool or a renowned social scientist collaborating with us to develop a methodology for AI testing.
To demonstrate our benevolence, Proof builds tools that creators and audiences can use themselves.
To demonstrate integrity, Proof provides an ingredients label for each investigation — which describes our techniques and approach. Proof is also primarily focused on YouTube and TikTok, where audiences are more interactive.
This year, Proof News used these techniques in its accountability work on topics such as how flawed AI was at answering voter queries, how energy and water intensive AI is, and how YouTube video scripts were used to train leading AI models without creators consent.
Certainly, Proof News is only one of many possible approaches toward improving trust in journalism. But I believe it’s urgent to experiment with new ways to hold power to account. (P.S. Proof News is donor supported, so if you can support us, I’d be wildly grateful.)
As always, thanks for reading and happy holidays!
Best,
Julia