Depth and Breadth: How News Organisations Navigate Trade-offs Around Building Trust in News

Abstract

This report summarises major challenges news organisations face around building and sustaining trust with the public, focusing on four countries with varying media and political systems (Brazil, India, the United Kingdom, and the United States). The analysis draws on nine roundtable conversations held virtually in 2021 with 54 senior newsroom leaders and argues that one of the key questions news outlets face is around whether to build trust broadly with the public or instead to focus on deepening trust with audiences already predisposed to trust them. News organisations evaluated this question differently depending on their mission and business models, with many viewing trust as a means to an end including membership or subscription revenue. While this makes sense for individual outlets given the pressures and incentives they face, the report highlights the potential problem it poses for journalism generally as those who are most disengaged from news get excluded from trust-building initiatives.