Wednesday 17th January: Is 'trust' a useless metric?

Good morning! Today’s newsletter is brought to you by Chris.

We’re about to increase the daily rate for this ad slot in the newsletter as subscriber numbers have grown, but before we do so, you have until the end of January to book slots (for any weekday this year) at the current rate!

I’ve always disliked the term ‘trust’ when it comes to quantifying the public’s relationship with their media. It’s always felt too woolly, too abstract, and a little too self-aggrandising on the part of the newspapers that trumpet their trust statistics. At the same time, it does encompass a variety of different factors from propensity to believe a given brand’s reporting to affection for the brand, so there really isn’t a better term available.

Which is why it’s fascinating to see an op-ed on exactly that from Patrick Johnson for journalism.co.uk. He is responding to an argument from LSE’s Charlie Beckett, in which Beckett argues journalists need to “realise that 'trust' is a useless metric of their work”. Johnson disagrees, arguing that nuance is needed, rather than outright rejection of the metric.

He says ‘trust’ needs to be measured by demographic, rather than as absolute measure of the entire addressable audience: “More specifically, I think 2024 is our opportunity to define trust and how differing and diverse communities define, appreciate, and interrogate trust. Trust cannot be defined as a monolithic concept.” It’s an interesting take, and one that I believe in — with the caveat that the term ‘trust’ itself is, ironically, still not to be trusted.

Few publishers expected subscriptions would magically solve all of their revenue woes, but any that did will be increasingly disappointed as acquisition and retention challenges grow in a maturing market. Peter Houston rounds up the year in subscriptions as part of our Media Moments 2023 report.

As we’ve written about before, 2024 will be the acid test for whether news organisations and GenAI platforms are prepared for AI-generated disinformation at scale. OpenAI has published a guide to how it, specifically, is looking to curb the use of its tech to misinform — though whether its approach will work remains to be seen. The most interesting thing for me here is “a provenance classifier”, a new tool for detecting images generated by DALL-E.

We don’t often talk about streaming services here, but this one’s an interesting partnership because of what it says about ad-funded tiers. Friend of the podcast Charlotte Henry has written extensively on how dominant Amazon Prime Video could be in the ad-funded streaming world — and this seems to be an attempt by Netflix to ameliorate some of that competitive disadvantage.

More from Media Voices