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The Trust Project is a complex international consortium involving approximately 120 news organizations including the The Economist, The Globe and Mail, the Independent Journal Review, Mic, Italy’s La Repubblica, and La Stampa working towards greater transparency and accountability in the global news industry. The Project was started in 2015 by Sally Lehrman, a journalist and director of Santa Clara University's journalism ethics program at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics. Lehram began building the Project in 2015.[1] The Project is funded by Craigslist founder Craig Newmark’s Philanthropic Fund, Google, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Democracy Fund, and the Markkula Foundation.[2]

Mandate

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The Trust Project was created to "strengthen public confidence in the news through accountability and transparency".[1] It is a consortium of top news companies working collectively to develop and implement transparency standards that for users can see and machines can read in order to increase accountability in journalism.[3][4]

Consortium members

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The consortium includes 120 members[5] such as The Economist, The Washington Post, Germany's Deutsche Presse-Agentur (DPA), The Globe and Mail, the Independent Journal Review (IJR), Mic, Italy’s La Repubblica, La Stampa,[2][6] Bay Area News Group, CBC News, Heavy.com, Sky News, The Toronto Star, TEGNA, Voice of Orange County, Italy's Corriere della Sera and Il Sole 24, Spain's El Pais, Greece's Kathimerini,[5] and Haymarket Media Group.[2] Members work closely with the Trust Project to display the required Trust Indicators, implement associated markup, and can use the Trust Mark logo.[7]

Core Trust Indicators and editorial attributes

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The consortium "has created a set of digital standards called "Trust Indicators" to help identify and surface high quality reporting from reliable news sites."[1][3] According to the Trust Project, "Trust Indicators" are markings within published news articles that denote to readers the news websites' commitment to increased journalistic and ethical standards in reporting.[4] The Trust Project's transparency standards are intended to assist journalist to "serve society with a truthful, intelligent and comprehensive account of events and ideas."[8]

The consortium has created its own content management system (CMS), editorial guidelines,[9][10] and style guide.[10][11] These reflect the consortium's shared principles through policies on ethics, corrections, anonymous sourcing, and fact-checking standards.[10] News articles use markup language, user experience (UX) as "pieces of online code to deliver improved search and news results"[6] by providing readers with information including the author/journalist and how the story was reported.[10]

Background

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According to an October 25, 2014 article by Jeff Jarvis published in Medium, Richard Gingras, head of Google News, and Sally Lehrman,[Notes 1][12] had begun a campaign to build trust in the news through a "set of practical tactics".[13] These included statements of mission and ethics crafted and published by news agencies, disclosure by journalists of their background regarding level of expertise and "areas of personal interest and conflict", full disclosure of all contributors to the content of an article including researchers, editors, and lawyers, the use of citations, footnotes, and corrections with links, and disclosure of their methodology including "whom they interviewed" and "what they researched".[13] Gingras and Lehrman have been described as co-founders of The Trust Project. Gingras "oversees Google’s effort to enable a healthy, open ecosystem for quality journalism, which includes Accelerated Mobile Pages, Subscribe with Google, the Trust Project and various other efforts to provide tools for journalists and news providers."[14]: 190 

Sally Lehrman, a journalist and director of Santa Clara University's journalism ethics program at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, is the head of the Trust Project.[1] In his February 2018 article, Dan Peleschuk wrote that The Truth Project officially had "been two years in the making" but was, in reality, the "culmination of many more years of professional self-reflection" on the part of Lehrman.[15] Lehrman interest in "accountability and public transparency" was inspired in part by the 1975 Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, "when geneticists debated the potential dangers of biomedical research in an attempt to raise public awareness."[15]

The pre-launch of the Trust Project was in April 2017 and the launch with the first group of publishers—The Economist, The Globe and Mail, the Independent Journal Review, Mic, Germany's Deutsche Presse-Agentur (DPA), Trinity Mirror, The Washington Post, Italy’s La Repubblica, and La Stampa—took place in the November 2017.[2][10] Mic reported that their company had been working on a similar project prior to joining the consortium.[10]

Following its November 2017 launch, Facebook, Google and Twitter, also began to deploy the new trust indicator symbols to "help assure users of the reliability of their content and combat fabricated stories".[6]

ON November 15, 2017, Twitter changed their verification methods under the Truth Project policies, and some white nationalists lost their blue checkmark.[16]

Funding

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The Project is funded by Craigslist founder Craig Newmark’s Philanthropic Fund, Google, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Democracy Fund, and the Markkula Foundation.[2] Newmark said, "As a news consumer, I want news I can trust. I want to be able to read a piece of news and know who’s behind it, where the information comes from, and the reporting values of the news organization."[6]

Response

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According to The Mirror Group's January to March 2018 study undertaken by Reach plc readers trust rose by 8% "after adopting Trust Project indicators".[10][17] In his 2014 article, Jeff Jarvis said that The Trust Project represented "a start" in rebuilding trust in "journalism, news, and media."[13] Business wire compared the Project’s Trust Indicators to nutritional labels that consortium partners can use to "provide clarity on who and what is behind a news story so that people can easily assess whether it comes from a credible source."[18]

Notes

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  1. ^ According to a 2006 profile by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, Sally Lehram was a "national diversity chair for the Society of Professional Journalists" and "award-winning independent journalist" who published in Scientific American, Nature, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and worked as columnist and reporter at The San Francisco Examiner. She was "a USC Annenberg Institute for Justice and Journalism Expert Fellow and is active in several organizations that promote diversity in the media." SPJ awarded her the the Wells Memorial Key for her work in this area. Her 2006 publication examined "news coverage of a changing America", was "commissioned in early 2004 by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation as a fresh perspective on the issue of news and newsroom diversity."


References

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  1. ^ a b c d "Sally Lehrman". Markkula Center for Applied Ethics. Retrieved December 28, 2018.
  2. ^ a b c d e "Facebook, Google and others join The Trust Project, an effort to increase transparency around online news". TechCrunch. November 16, 2017. Retrieved December 28, 2018.
  3. ^ a b "Launching New Trust Indicators From the Trust Project for News on Facebook". Facebook Media. November 16, 2017. Retrieved December 28, 2018.
  4. ^ a b Lehrman, Sally (October 16, 2014). "Online Chaos Demands Radical Action by Journalism to Earn Trust". Markkula Center for Ethics. Retrieved October 16, 2014.
  5. ^ a b Beard, David (October 9, 2018). "Increasing trust: The expanding Trust Project". Poynter Institute. Retrieved March 14, 2019.
  6. ^ a b c d "Facebook, Google, Twitter and media outlets fight hoaxes with 'trust indicators'". USA Today. November 16, 2017. Retrieved November 27, 2017. Cite error: The named reference "usatoday_20171116" was defined multiple times with different content (see the help page).
  7. ^ "Collaborators". The Trust Project. nd. Retrieved March 14, 2019.
  8. ^ "Core Trust Indicators and Editorial Attributes". Markkula Center for Applied Ethics Santa Clara University. Collaborator Materials. nd. Retrieved March 14, 2019.
  9. ^ "Editorial Standards". Mic. nd. Retrieved March 14, 2019.
  10. ^ a b c d e f g Cite error: The named reference Poynter_20181009 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  11. ^ "Mic Official Style Guide". Google Docs. nd. Retrieved March 14, 2019.
  12. ^ Lehrman, Sally (2006). News in a New America (PDF) (Report). John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. p. 152. ISBN 0-9749702-1-2. Retrieved March 14, 2019.
  13. ^ a b c Jarvis, Jeff (October 25, 2014). "Building Trust in News". Whither news?. Retrieved March 14, 2019.
  14. ^ Crisis in Democracy: Renewing Trust in America (PDF) (Report). The Knight Commission. February 4, 2019. p. 208. Retrieved March 14, 2019.
  15. ^ a b Peleschuk, Dan (February 16, 2018). "On the Front Line of the Battle Against Fake News". OZY. Retrieved March 14, 2019.
  16. ^ Guynn, Jessica (November 15, 2017). "Twitter verification purge: White nationalists lose blue checkmark". USA Today. San Francisco. Retrieved March 14, 2019.
  17. ^ Tenzer, Andrew (2018), "Measuring the Impact of the Trust Project" (PDF), The Trust Project, retrieved March 14, 2019
  18. ^ "Major Effort to Increase Trust in News Achieves Widespread Adoption". Business Wire. Santa Clara, California. October 9, 2018. Retrieved March 14, 2019.
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