Trusting News’ Joy Mayer on how newsrooms can build trust among audiences

Editor’s note: this interview is part of The Fix’s email course on audience building and engagement for editorial leaders by Emma Löfgren. You can subscribe for free to access the whole course.

There’s a trust deficit in the news media. Less than half of respondents told the Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report 2024 they trust most news, with most people (72 percent) citing transparency in how the news is made as a factor that influences who to trust.

But are news outlets as transparent as they should be? 

I spoke with Joy Mayer, founder of Trusting News, for The Fix’s newsletter course in audience building. Here are some of her best tips for building (and earning) trust. 

When it comes to communicating with your audience, what are the main things that newsrooms should be doing in your opinion?

It’s amazing how much the public doesn’t know about journalism that journalists take for granted is well understood.

One strategy for figuring out where to start is to talk to people who are not news junkies about the news and you’ll hear that they don’t use the same language journalists do, that they don’t understand some basic things about how journalism operates. It’s really helpful for newsrooms to get a sense of what kinds of questions the public has.

Basic facts that journalists take for granted are that we pick stories to cover based on what we think is the most important for the public to know. 

Then you go out and talk to people and realise that they’re assuming you pick stories based on what you are personally interested in, what agenda you are trying to further in your community or what’s going to make you the most money. 

All of which are sometimes true, but the basic ethics that serve as a foundation for journalistic decision-making are not obvious to the public.

People assume all kinds of things about how journalism is funded, about what corporate ownership, commercial interests or political interests are determining about what gets covered and what journalists aren’t allowed to cover.

We hear a lot of basic misassumptions thrown journalists’ way, like “you’re probably covering this sports team instead of this sports team because you want one to win, right?” People will tune out a whole publication because they think that there’s a bias toward a certain sports team.

I just think the more that journalists talk to people who are not fully engaged in the news, the more they understand what they’re getting wrong and who feels left out of the news.

We’re doing a lot of work around news avoidance and people who just don’t tune in very much to the news. Journalists are not at all tuned into that. They’re very judgy about news consumption. They think that they have a moral judgment about what it means to keep up with the news, that people who don’t tune into a lot of news must not be very smart, curious or engaged. They don’t understand how casually people interact with the news.

When you say that, I remember that during the Covid pandemic, the Civil Contingencies Agency in Sweden, where I’m based, issued recommendations for people on how to manage their mental health during the pandemic. One of the things they said was to limit your news consumption. And journalists went ballistic, because how dare they suggest such a thing – they felt it was a threat to democracy.

But isn’t it true? I sometimes avoid the news for my mental health. It feels like an investment in myself to unplug sometimes. Of course, everybody should selectively avoid the news. I think the main problem is when people are choosing not to engage at all with the news.

But you know what? There’s a lot of people who don’t exist in an information ecosystem where there’s a lot of benefit to staying on top of the news. A lot of people aren’t sitting at computers all day and don’t have friends who are very engaged in the news, and don’t really see it as a problem that they don’t consume news.

Journalists should understand that. Journalists should be deeply curious about why they’re not being seen as useful or important. We should be leaning into that.

Instead it’s like we doubled down on serving the political junkies and the news junkies and don’t really understand how to serve the people who don’t see us as an important part of their lives.

Do you recommend having a person in the newsroom who’s responsible for communicating with readers, like a public editor or audience editor, or should that task be down to every reporter? I can see the benefits of both approaches.

There are benefits to both. I wish newsrooms would have public editors more often, I think there is a benefit for somebody serving that role. But I think my ideal solution would be that it’s part of everybody’s job to be continually curious and seek information about why people don’t engage in the news or why people don’t feel well served by the news.

In my ideal world everyone in the newsroom would have one conversation a month, just a 30-minute conversation with somebody who is not deeply engaged in the news, to find out what they’re missing, how they’re maybe operating just fine without the news, or what they wish were covered, or what assumptions they have about how journalism operates.

Then there would be a form the journalists would fill out or a Slack channel where they would share some highlights – some way to feed the insights back into the newsroom.

This way, the newsroom can say “are we covering everything we need to about this topic”, and somebody might say, “what about that person Joy talked to a few weeks ago, she would probably say that we’re missing XYZ, so what are we doing about that?”

I think building continual insight and knowledge in the newsroom about who does not feel well served by journalism is just crucial when we’re talking about growing audience.

I often hear journalists explaining their journalism in an almost condescending way. It seems like the underlying assumption is that the only reason a reader might not like us is because they don’t understand how we do journalism, and maybe the answer is “well actually they do understand it, they just don’t like what they’re seeing”.

Yes, completely. When Trusting News began in 2016 we started off learning a lot about the need for transparency and what we wanted journalists to explain, and that remains true.

There are many things that journalists do not explain that they should explain, but the longer I do the work, the more focus I put on humility, the more focus I put on the need to understand who feels seen and understood by journalism, and who feels neglected or misrepresented by journalism. What do journalists get wrong? What do journalists miss?

If we’re not deeply curious about the answers to those questions, then it’s very hard to see how we will grow our audience by very much. Because the people who feel well served by journalism tend to have a lot in common with journalists. They tend to be more urban. They tend to be more educated. They tend to be more liberal. They tend to be more white.

If we are happy with our audience staying within that realm, then great. But if we would like to expand the people who feel seen and understood by journalism instead of misrepresented or neglected, then we need to understand what we’re getting wrong.

If someone reading this is thinking, well, we already do a bit of this. We try to listen to readers and that sort of thing. Do you have any recommendations for somebody who wants to level up their audience engagement in this way? Any practical ideas?

I think that the idea of making the routine around conversations with people who don’t trust the news is key. 

If you build that muscle over time, if it becomes a regular part of your newsroom to say “what are we missing, what are we getting wrong, who are we leaving out” then that has to have a positive impact on how you’re operating. It has to change the way you’re pitching stories, the way you’re listing out stakeholders for stories.

The other thing is that I find a lot of newsrooms cultures undervalue dissent, undervalue listening to people internally who might say “I’m not sure this story would feel right to people in the small town that I’m from” or “I think that if we use this word it’s going to land differently with some communities than we think – that word feels neutral to us but it’s going to feel pejorative to people where I come from”.

I think we should pay attention to the fact that a lot of newsroom cultures can coalesce around a dominant worldview and newsroom staffs are not as diverse as they should be ideologically. From so many perspectives we’re not as diverse as we should be, but I think where we do have diversity of thought and perspective and values in the newsroom, we too often don’t reward people for speaking up.

I would like to be in a newsroom where we stop in a story meeting and say “OK, I need to hear from people about what we haven’t talked about so far about what we might be missing” and then make it safe for people to say “I think we’re getting this wrong” or “I think we’re going to get this kind of pushback”. The more the newsroom listens to people in the community, the easier it is to anticipate what that pushback might be.

One key is that the goal is not for journalists to meet individually with people who don’t trust the news in order to persuade them to trust the news. This is not a debate. The goal of the conversation is not to argue with people and say “actually, you’re wrong, we are trustworthy” or “here are all the links where we cover that story you say we never cover”.

Although sometimes you really want to say that!

Sometimes you really want to, but save it for the end of the conversation at least. The tone of the conversation needs to be one about building understanding and empathy in service of doing better journalism in the future, not about winning over the person you’re talking to.

How do you streamline audience engagement while keeping it genuine?

It’s really tricky. Depending on the size of your audience and the scale of your engagement efforts you can’t respond to everyone personally. Here are a few tips I have:

• Prioritise engagement that reaches more than one person, so if you’re going back and forth with somebody in a public comment, thousands of people might be watching the exchange. You’re reaching not just the person you’re engaging with but everybody else who’s reading the comments.

• Save responses. If you hear the same complaints over and over and you take the time to draft a response in an email, save that and stick it in a Slack channel or in a Google Doc and share it with your colleagues, so that when you get it again you’re not starting the conversation from scratch.
• One of our favourite strategies is to have an FAQ about your coverage. I wish every beat, every department in a news outlet would have an FAQ: here’s how we cover crime, here’s how we cover sports, here’s how we cover politics, here’s how we cover climate, and get on the record about how you decide which stories to write or to produce, what your goals are, how your sourcing works, what your ethics are in a certain topic area. Once you do that job then you can just link to that section of your FAQ when somebody has a question about it.

So try to be more efficient, but also, you do have to be selective about who gets your energy. 

Some people are not persuadable, some people are going to argue as long as you let them, some people are worthy of your generous response and some people are not, so I do think that as journalists we have to prioritise who to write back to.

Do you know if there are any stats on how many people actually read FAQs?

The more you direct people to it, the more they’re going to read it.

One problem with transparency in journalism is that too often journalists will decide they are ready to get on the record about their approach. They’ll write a column or an FAQ, and then they pat themselves on the back and say, “well done”.

And then they never direct anybody’s attention to it. Maybe it’s linked from their “about us” page. Maybe it’s in the opinion section one Sunday, because the editor writes a column. But they forget that it’s there. And then they wonder why they’re not getting credit for it.

You can do reporter two-ways on air, if you’re radio or TV, where you explore how a topic is covered. You can link to your FAQ online from social or newsletters. Everywhere that your audience is learning about what you cover, they could also be learning about how you cover it. Directing attention back to that information about how you operate is crucial.

It’s hard to be completely honest about how you do your journalism. Sometimes you get something wrong in an article and a reader assumes it’s because you’re biased, when actually the truth is “well, I was just a bit tired and wanted to go home, so I just published it too quickly”. But you don’t really want to tell people that.

But also, sometimes you’re biased.

I think sometimes we don’t want to tell people that, we don’t want to talk about how we operate because we’re not sure that we are on solid ground.

Sometimes with transparency, we’ll tell newsrooms that you should remind people that you correct your errors. That’s a bedrock of good journalism practice – when you get something wrong, you admit it, right? And I’ll say, actually, I’m not sure we always do. Before you’re ready to pull back the curtain, make sure your house is in order.

Part of the humility I’m talking about is things like bias. Because there are absolutely things where journalists don’t realise that their values, experiences and perspectives are showing up in their work in ways that they’re not really conscious of. We should have a lot more humility when we get complaints like that, and wonder whether they’re true.

But you’re absolutely right that very often the answer about “why didn’t you cover this event on Saturday?” is “well, somebody called in sick” or “I wanted to but my editor sent me to a different story”. Sometimes we don’t have great answers for the questions.

But I think that you can also behave like a human being. You can respond and say, I really wanted to cover that. But unfortunately we only had four reporters on Saturday and we just didn’t get to it. People assume there’s an army of reporters, and when you say “we had 20 story ideas and four reporters”, they’re like “oh I had no idea”.

Or be honest by just acknowledging that “you’re right, I wish I’d read that through another time. After I published it, I wish I had phrased it a different way”. We think that there’s weakness in acknowledging that and being human. But it can really build trust.

More and more newsrooms are doing this kind of work and at least here in Europe, there are a lot of really exciting news startups that are very active on social media and very good at explaining their journalism, which I love. But sometimes there’s a part of me that thinks, do readers care? Don’t they want to read the story instead of how you covered the story? Is there a danger that we can get so lost in explaining our journalism that we forget that our main job is to produce that journalism?

Yes, absolutely. I think that we can also really bore the audience by doing transparency in a way that is not interesting.

Sometimes I’ll work with a newsroom and they’ll say “oh Joy, we made a video about how we cover city government, I’m so excited to show it to you”. And it’s like four minutes of reporters saying “well, first I get the agenda for the meeting and then I read through it and then I decided…” like a chronological accounting. Nobody cares. That’s not it, right?

The key to transparency is when it addresses common complaints or misassumptions about the news.

Or if people say things like “the news is really hard to understand, I can’t keep up because I don’t consume enough news – I feel like I would have to catch up on the news in order to understand the news”. What’s your antidote to that? Do you have a weekly newsletter that catches people up?

Or if people say that news is really depressing but you actually have a solutions journalism team – are you talking about how you work to report on people who are solving problems, not just on what the problems are?

If you are an antidote to some of the common complaints about journalism, focus your transparency there. Don’t focus your transparency on how hard you’re working, or what good people you are.

I think a lot of times, transparency is really boring. For me, people are not interested in how you operate. People don’t wake up in the morning saying “I wonder how journalists are making decisions today?” They’re interested when it overlaps with something they’re frustrated by or something they’re particularly interested in.

But I really love when I see startup newsrooms investing in transparency, because I think that when you’re starting from scratch, it’s especially important to tell the story of what you’re trying to do.

Traditional media, legacy media, can get very lazy about that, or not realise people don’t know who you are and how you operate. You have to actually introduce yourself. The fact that you have this brand that people’s parents and grandparents have read or watched for a long time doesn’t mean that everybody trusts you or even knows what you do.

So I understand the concern that it could go overboard or not be interesting, but I mostly think newsrooms need to do more of it. It’s not very often that I see a newsroom and think they’re investing too much time in transparency.

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