Richard Gingras elaborates on Trust Project ideas about signals that may build credibility.
Here’s his 5-minute talk on trust, maybe indulge me and watch it:
Like Richard says, we’re trying to keep the focus on the community of editors, reporters, and publishers that is developing ideas to win trust. What do you think the best ways to develop trust are?
Okay, I’ve gotten a big surge of support in the last few days, like fan mail and social media stuff.
That means a lot to me.
It all relates to two different but related areas:
1. Standing up to find trustworthy news. Like I say, a trustworthy press is the immune system of democracy.
The Trust Project is the pointy end of the spear on the news professional side. Unfortunately, I might fulfill that role on the news consumer side. (I don’t like that.)
2. Standing up against untrustworthy reporting attacking my community. My stuff is mostly very quiet, long term, since I’m in way over my head, but I’m committed for at least a twenty year period, and to be relentless. As a nerd, it’s hard to learn, and I’m not very patient.
3. People tell me I looked really good and was quite the gentleman. I guess they’re right, but I really am a nerd; we don’t take compliments well.
But a nerd’s gotta do what a nerd’s gotta do.
I’m a news consumer. I’m not trying to tell anybody how to do their job, or how to fix the news. I’m not in the business, and will respect professional boundaries.
I just want news I can trust. I also want to help reward good, honest journalism.
Since I’m not an expert, I have to defer to those who are. I’ve spent about ten years talking to a lot of these folks, and have recently joined the boards of Poynter Institute and Columbia Journalism Review, in addition to the Center for Public Integrity and Sunlight Foundation.
I do feel that most journalists perform admirably, but it takes very little to compromise trust in a news publication.
There’re good reasons to hope for the restoration of “the immune system of democracy,” but here’s a little of what gives me bad nights:
But since when did the practice of journalism allow for uncritically making shit up? ::shaking head:: Where’s the fine line between poor journalism and fabrication?
Old school, editors expected reporters to get stuff right, they prized their credibility, weren’t so concerned about selling ads. That message: “get it right.” Plausible fake news could get through the editors, but it was considered wrong.
New school, of recent years, seems to send the message: “don’t get caught.” Editors don’t seem to care as long as the fakeness is good enough, and sensationalist enough to sell ads.
Nowadays a lie gets everywhere before a good actor can even respond.
Please remember that I do feel that most journalists perform admirably, but it takes very little to compromise trust in a news publication.
That is, it looks to me like the vast majority of people in news try really hard, and perform admirably under intense pressure.
However, often the requirement is only that a story must be plausible, and under pressure, that replaces due diligence and accountability, except in black and white situations, like plagiarism.
So, we see a lot of “stenography,” particularly in politics, the acceptance of received or conventional wisdom, per the story subjects described earlier. Jon Stewart illustrated this when he showed the visible reaction of a reporter, responding to an obvious political lie, who had to “leave it there”…repeated every half hour.
Good news, everyone!
There are hardass press organizations insisting on stricter ethics and accountability, like the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) and the Online News Association (ONA).
Me, I’m not looking to be a hardass. I know the news business is brutally tough. I’m not looking for perfection. As a news consumer, I’m happy with a good faith effort.
Do your best to get it right. If you do, great. If you don’t, admit you got it wrong, fix it, even if hard, and try harder next time.
And we should reward journalists and press outlets that are practicing good, honest journalism.
Recently, I heard about the Trust Project at the 
Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University in cooperation with Richard Gingras, a longtime advocate of innovation in journalism, who happens to oversee Google News.
Jeff Jarvis built on this work. He suggested that Google News give higher rankings to news reports that are probably more trustworthy, rewarding ethical practice in maybe the best way possible.
(I don’t think I present Jeff’s ideas well here, but he seems to be the pointy end of the spear regarding news ethics, on the professional side.)
“More trustworthy” is a really difficult problem, it involves figuring out ways that articles propagate signals regarding their trustworthiness.
That’s just the beginning of conversation, which is mission-critical for the survival of American democracy. How do we refine these signals into something useful? What other signals are useful? What can you add?
Remember, I’m just a news consumer like most people, unfortunately the pointy end of the spear from that perspective.
I just want news I can trust.
Note: After a reader called to our attention that the quote, “A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on,” was not said by Winston Churchill, we knew we had to do the same thing we think the media should do when someone calls out an error – admit it and fix it. Currently the author is unknown, and the quote was removed from the post.
Coupla years ago, I blurted out that “the press is the immune system of democracy.” That’s what I learned from my high school history teacher, Anton Schulzki.
That’s not working so well. We’ve had major press scandals recently, including some obvious failures to follow through with widely known information. A few, really egregious failures: WMD, the economic crash around 2008, ObamaCare, VA scandals starting in 2002 and the current badly misreported scandals, and the IRS failing to pursue fake political nonprofits.
With a track record like this, should anyone want to buy news?
I’m a news consumer, and I just want news I can trust. For around a decade, publishers, editors, journalist and ethicists have given me quite the education. I’ve never suggested how to fix the news — I just want to fix the trust and ethics part.
I see how tough the job is; people have to fill the “news hole” every day, with something sensational that might sell some soap or something.
That’s a lot of pressure, lots of job insecurity, and I always want to give people a break.
Let’s do something constructive, maybe starting with an allusion to an article by danah boyd, “Rule #1, Do No Harm.” In that article, she wonders: “When did it become acceptable to make shit up?”
So, first, a generous and constructive approach starts with “do no harm.” Beyond that, I’m looking for serious good faith in conducting serious fact-checking, and serious correction of the errors that get through anyway.
Since bad info spreads fast, sometimes virally, honest correction might be challenging. It would require repeating the truth, asking other news outlets to correct the disinfo, and even some SEO work. Corrections should not reinforce the error, a common problem given human perception.
How will news orgs start to self-enforce in tough situations?
For example, how do you catch a reporter who is skilled in making up plausible but false stories, or who relies on other unchecked reports?
How can that happen if a heavily burdened editor says, “Just don’t get caught”?
That is, news orgs should be held accountable for damage they cause, just like other professionals are held responsible for malpractice.
There’s hope; both the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) and the Online News Association (ONA) are doing good work.
With this renewal of trustworthiness via ethics, we could reestablish the immune system of democracy.
No one has the answers for the hardest challenges, but the next step is to adopt a serious ethics/trustworthiness code, and then start working on accountability.
I’m a news consumer. I won’t tell anyone how to do their job — I just want news I can trust. Through this ethics/trustworthiness effort, maybe we all can help the pros fix this huge problem.
Specifically, how can we all work together to make this happen?
| This was originally posted in the LinkedIn Series, Let’s Fix It. Read all the stories here and write your own (please include the hashtag #FixIt in the body of your post). |
Photo: Author’s Own and Juan García / Flickr
Folks, I started this craigconnects thing because I really want to use tech to give a real voice to the voiceless, and real power to the powerless. Ever 
since starting craigconnects, I’ve created a list of issues areas that I’m really focusing on. It’s important that we work together, as a community, and collaborate to create real social change. You can’t change the world from the top down.
Here are just 5 (of many) reasons we need social change:
Personally, I’m a nerd, and feel that life should be fair, that everyone gets a chance to be heard, and maybe to help run things. Sure, life isn’t fair, but that won’t slow me down. A nerd’s gotta do what a nerd’s gotta do.
Note to self: JUST LISTEN. That is, don’t ALWAYS attempt to solve the problem, SOMETIMES YOU JUST NEED TO LISTEN. (Courtesy of “You Just Don’t Understand” by Deborah Tannen.)
Folks, I just want news I can trust. As I’ve been saying, the press should be the immune system of democracy, and needs to fulfill that role again. With the Internet, everyone can be their own journalist now. It’s become increasingly difficult to find news that comes from a trustworthy press.
Factchecking efforts only have value, it’s felt, if:
My team and I compiled a list of 4 factchecking sites that are the real deal (in no particular order, and please note that none are perfect, and sometimes their calls are called into question):
What sites do you follow because they’re the most ethical and trustworthy? More to come…
Recently, the folks at the Harvard Berkman Center and the MIT Media Lab had a really good conference and hackathon addressing Truthiness in Digital Media. Truthiness in the Stephen Colbert sense, where people just make up stuff which they want to be true. A lot of good progress was reported, particularly involving citizens and professionals working together to do serious factchecking.
Personal bias: I was very much the outsider there, not in the news business or anything related to it. While I’m not going to tell anyone how to do their job, I feel the country needs the news media to restore trust in their reporting, in large part, by doing lots of factchecking again. That bias, and my limited reporting skills, means that I’m not doing justice in this post to any of the good work discussed at this conference.
There are plenty of good factchecking efforts in progress. However, I figure that we need to address what Jon Stewart calls the “CNN leaves it there” problem. That’s where a reporter sees that a public figure is lying, but doesn’t factcheck the speaker, saying that they have to “leave it there”… and then repeating the lie, reinforcing it.
To be clear, we’re talking about lying in the black and white sense, not addressing half truths or spin. There’s plenty of that around.
At the MIT Media Lab, I worked with a number of humans, all much smarter than me, on what I feel is the big, unaddressed problem regarding factchecking. Factchecking alone, is like a tree falling in the forest, where no one hears it or cares about it. Factchecking efforts only have value, it’s felt, if:
The hackathon group I was part of tried to address this, and while factchecking is hard, this is much more so.
There are specific efforts, most notable of which is FlackCheck.org, from the folks who bring you FactCheck.org. Their deal is that if a SuperPAC runs a TV ad which is clearly deceptive, they encourage citizens to report that to the TV station running the ad. People would ask the station to pull the ad, citing the proof of deception, and reminding station people that it doesn’t serve the public interest to promote a lie.
There are other efforts which make such a call to action, though there’s at least one major effort, not announced yet. Current trustworthy, really good efforts include, in no particular order:
So, our team efforts focused on calling for more factchecking call to action projects, but then, finding a way to consolidate them, simply, so that anyone can find the effort that best suits them. More specifically, we’re looking for simple, direct, calls to action. The FlackCheck.org model is a good example of that, particularly since every call to a local TV station can help make a difference.
We need some way to glue together these efforts, emphasizing their independence and trustworthiness, something simple. In my personal experience, that helps attract an audience of millions.
Perhaps that consists of a single web page, listing those calls to action. We might find a way to really get people’s attention, with names like “Mob Justice with FactChecking” or, stealing from another team, “Lies with Friends.”
That also means individual action, from people who’d share calls to action with their own social networks, via email, Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and whatever works.
It means that whenever a factchecking system finds a significant misstatement, emails and social media based calls to action could be programmatically generated.
In addition, we’d like to draw attention to such an effort with targeted ads, in Facebook, Google, and elsewhere. The deal is find people where they spend time, while trying to avoid preaching to the converted.
This could easily include a Google search of trusted factchecking sites, given judicious use of the “site:” search clause.
A lot of other ideas were suggested toward this end, and here’s two:
Frankly, I was overwhelmed by the quantity of good, concrete suggestions; this is my best effort to boil it all down and make sense of it.
More to come…
Craig Connects 
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