Monday 27th November: The difficulties of measuring trust

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Mx3 AI is next week! Join Media Makers Meet and the Media Voices team in London on Dec 7th to explore how local news orgs, nationals, magazines and B2B publishers are getting to grips with AI.

This week, to help us dissect the year in trust, we’re joined by Dr Amy Ross Arguedas, a Postdoctoral Researcher Fellow at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. Between 2020 and September 2023, she worked on the Trust in News Project, and she’s currently a part of the team working on the Reuters Institute’s annual Digital News Report.

Amy tells Chris and I about the work of the Trust in News Project, and how to go about measuring trust in a way which is useful. She explains how trust is affected by political divisions and whether the impact of publisher mistakes is long-lasting, as well as the opportunities for more traditional sources to engage younger people.

We also explore the potential impacts of AI on trust; how transparent should publishers be with their use of it, as well as the risks and opportunities AI presents for the fight against misinformation.

Mark Alker originally flagged the effect some of Google’s latest “helpful content” algorithm changes were having on Singletrackworld in our community forum back in September. So it’s interesting (and concerning) to see the impact here on other news and publisher websites throughout the autumn. SEO expert Lily Ray said “volatility is expected” from core updates. I mean, when is volatility ever not expected these days…

This has been added to my to-read pile after our own annual Media Moments report is out the door. In their latest report, our friends at Media Makers Meet have looked at what it takes to build a successful specialist consumer media business. Not reliance on SEO, if the above story is anything to go by.

A slightly off-the-wall choice but if you work for a business or manage people then I think this is a must-read for the week. Explainable director Kevin Donnellan noted on our Newsrewired special podcast episode that he was seeing employees increasingly not be completely honest about their use of AI at work. “The argument shouldn’t be: ‘These jobs have sadly been eliminated because of AI’,” he argues. “It should be: ‘These employees have been freed up to do more valuable work. What should that work entail?’”

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