1) Trust in news is based on editorial practices, political principles, and collective identities. Trust is relational - it depends on connecting with audiences and demonstrating shared beliefs and values. 2) People are trying to address issues around trust in news through transparency projects, machine-readable signals of reliability, and building relational trust. 3) While professionalism is important for trustworthiness, trust ultimately depends on who news organizations serve and represent. News outlets must connect on principles and identities to be truly trusted.

1. @rasmus_kleis
@risj_oxford
No one likes us, and we don’t
care?
Rasmus Kleis Nielsen
Director, Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism
University of Oxford
Presentation at the World News Media Congress 2019

2. Trust is important, but also dangerous

3. “Nothing follows from examples of sporadic untrustworthiness, however
flamboyant, except the sober truth that today—as always—not everybody is
fully trustworthy and trust must be placed with care.
Without the full range of evidence—including full evidence of trustworthy
action—we cannot draw sound conclusions about a new or a deepening
crisis of trust.
Unless we take account of the good news of trustworthiness as well as the
bad news of untrustworthiness, we won't know whether we have a crisis of
trust or only a culture of suspicion.”
Onora O’Neill, A Question of Trust, 2002, Reith Lectures BBC

4. Who trust the news, where, via what
channels, from whom, and why?

5. Trust in different news channels
ALL 37 MARKETS - % THAT TRUST EACH MOST OF THE TIME
Uncertainty in distributed environments, information
unchecked, hard to distinguish news from rumor...
Mostly this about trust in mainstream media
and in the sources that people use
Trust news
I use
44%
Trust news
overall
51%
Trust news
in search
34%
Trust news
in social
23%

6. 6
Q6_2016_1. Please indicate your level of agreement with the following statements. I think you can trust most news most of the time. Base: Total sample
in each market. Note: Also showing change from 2017.
Proportion that agree you can trust most news most of
the time - across countries

7. Brand level trust – United States
• Local news and broadcast most trusted
• Quality newspapers next
• Digital born trusted less
• Partisan brands more trusted by users
10 POINT SCALE (0 IS UNTRUSTWORTHY, 10 COMPLETELY TRUSTWORTHY
Q6_2018. How trustworthy would you say news from the following
brands is? Use the scale below, where 0 is ‘not at all trustworthy’ and
10 is ‘completely trustworthy’.
Base: Total sample/all who used each brand in the last week.

8. Editorial practices
(Political) principles
(Collective) identities
What is trust in news content based on?

9. 9
Q1F. Some people talk about ‘left’, ‘right’ and
‘centre’ to describe parties and politicians. With
mind, where would you place yourself on the
following scale? Q6_2018_1. Please indicate your
level of agreement with the following statements. I
think you can trust most news most of the tim2e3.
Base: Left/right: 2016 = 476/591, 2017 = 530/533,
2018 = 567/550.
Trust in the US by political orientation

10. How are people trying to address
issues around trust?

11. 11
Trust projects - machine-readable signals

12. 12
Trust projects - transparency

13. 13
Trust projects - relational

14. Editorial practices
(Political) principles
(Collective) identities
What is trust in news content based on?

15. Trust in news is about what we do.
But it is also about who we do it for. It is about who
these people are, about their principles, their
identities.
We do get to chose to be trustworthy in a
professional sense.
But because trust is relational, we do not get to be
trusted on that basis alone. For that, we have to
connect and demonstrate what we believe in and
who we are for.
What have you done to do that?

16. Further reading
Fletcher, Richard, and Rasmus Kleis Nielsen. 2018. “Generalised Scepticism: How
People Navigate News on Social Media.” Information, Communication & Society 0 (0):
1–19.
Newman, Nic, Richard Fletcher, Antonis Kalogeropoulos, David A. L Levy, and Rasmus
Kleis Nielsen. 2018. “Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2018.” Oxford: Reuters
Institute for the Study of Journalism.
O’Neill, Onora. 2002. A Question of Trust. Reith Lectures ; 2002. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Vir, Jason, and Andrew Dodds. 2016. “Brand and Trust in a Fragmented News
Environment.” Oxford: Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism (with Kantar
Media).