Welcome to In Reality, the podcast about truth and the media with Eric Schurenberg, a long-time journalist and media exec, now the founder of the Alliance for Trust in Media.

It’s not exactly news that the traditional news business is in decline. Most distressing to those of us who grew up in the profession: that audience levels of trust in the work we do has dropped to the lowest levels ever recorded.

Today’s guest, Julia Angwin, back for a second time on In Reality, is like Eric a product of the traditional news business. She worked at the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, and also founded startup newsrooms like the Markup and, most recently, Proof News. But that’s not why she’s here today though...

Julia recently penned research for Harvard’s Shorenstein Center about what traditional newsrooms can learn from online influencers about trust. According to her paper, you earn trust by convincing others that you are competent to do what you say; that you have integrity and that you have their best interests in mind.

Julia and I discuss how influencers support those beliefs about themselves, without benefit of institutional brand names; how traditional newsrooms squandered trust; and ,what journalism needs to do about it.

Read Julia's Paper! The Future of Trustworthy Information: Learning from Online Content Creators

Takeaways

• Trust in media has reached a historic low.
• The creator economy is significantly larger than traditional journalism.
• Content creators often have a closer relationship with their audience.
• Integrity and accountability are crucial for rebuilding trust.
• Journalism needs to engage more with its audience.
• The concept of objectivity in journalism is outdated.
• Benevolence is about serving the audience's needs.
• Transparency in journalism can enhance trust.
• The future of journalism may be more about practice than profession.
• Holding power to account is the core mission of journalism.

Website - free episode transcripts
www.in-reality.fm

Produced by Tom Platts at Sound Sapien
soundsapien.com

Alliance for Trust in Media
alliancefortrust.com

Welcome to in Reality, the podcast about truth, disinformation and the media. I’m your host Eric Schurenberg, a long-time journalist and media executive, now the founder of the Alliance for Trust in Media.

On previous episodes, we discussed how you can distinguish between reliable news online and unreliable, story by story. An obvious shortcut is simply to only read or view stories from places that you know to be reliable in advance. But these days, how do you know who is reliable?

Today’s guest is long-time journalist, prolific media entrepreneur and author, Steven Brill, whose six-year-old company, NewsGuard, helps readers and advertisers identify trustworthy newsrooms, based on the newsrooms’ adherence to sound journalistic practices. In addition to starting media brands like American Lawyer and Brill’s Content, Brill has written numerous books on American culture—but the one that relates the most to NewsGuard is his most recent, the Death of Truth.

Eric gets Brill’s insights about how social media swamped truth with the unwitting help of respected advertisers and well-intentioned legislators; they talk about his proposed solutions to this mess; and also why non-partisan NewsGuard has suddenly, alarmingly, found itself in the crosshairs of the new Trump administration.

The Death of Truth by Steven Brill

NewsGuard

Website - free episode transcripts
www.in-reality.fm

Produced by Tom Platts at Sound Sapien
soundsapien.com

Alliance for Trust in Media
alliancefortrust.com

Welcome to In Reality, the podcast about truth, disinformation and the media with your host Eric Schurenberg, a long time journalist and media executive, now the founder of the Alliance for Trust in Media.

On In Reality, we talk a lot about the supply side of the information ecosystem, about journalism and social media and how disinformation gets spread. We talk less about the demand side—how we readers and viewers of news can trustworthy information. We’ll fix that imbalance a bit today, with a special guest, Michael Caulfield.

Caufield is a former professor at University of Washington and researcher at the Center for an Informed Public. He’s the author with Sam Wineburg of Verified, a book with the highly explanatory subtitle How to Think Straight, Get Duped Less and Make Better Decisions about What to Believe Online. The book introduces what I have found to be a highly useful, easy to remember and very quick way to quickly vet a claim you come across online. Caulfield and Wineburg call that technique by its acronym SIFT. I hope you’ll find it as handy as Eric does.

Website - free episode transcripts
www.in-reality.fm

Produced by Tom Platts at Sound Sapien
soundsapien.com

Alliance for Trust in Media
alliancefortrust.com