Who do you trust more: Google or your daily newspaper?
A survey by PR company Edelman shows that Google is considered by its users as a more trusted source of news than the pages it aggregates. Edelman’s 2014 Trust Barometer, based on interviews with 27,000 people, was announced at the World Economic Forum in Davos last week, and has been largely interpreted as a conflict between the media and the search engine, but I believe that there is a second, arguably more interesting, aspect to this in relation to trust and how it is built.
Online searches are now the number one source for general news or to check up on what the media might be reporting, and now match television as a way of keeping up with the latest news, particularly among young people. Which might prompt us to ask what makes us trust a search engine more, which doesn’t actually do any reporting, than the actual source of news.
My impression is that the question can be largely answered by looking at the elements that accompany the news item when it is found and visualized, thanks to the existence of an algorithm that puts the news item before our eyes, an algorithm that isn’t God, but the social component of which we trust when it comes to placing trust in it. The news in the search engine is not some isolated entity, but is there thanks to a social algorithm, giving it a certain importance; a kind of “second opinion”, which supplements and completes the source, giving it extra validity.
In second place comes a related effect: the news item in the media is alone and subject to the publication’s editorial line; while in the search engine, it is surrounded by other links that we can click on to see different perspectives on the same issue. This increases the value of the news item. In media that make good use of links and facilitate the reader with a second layer that allows the user to go deeper into the subject or to validate their affirmations, this effect will be less noteworthy with respect to the search engine than in those that limit themselves to offering their news with text and images, but that require you to go to another page to look for additional sources or alternatives.
In this context, efforts to change Spain’s intellectual property legislation by penalizing aggregators seem even more absurd: precisely at a time when users see the value in supplying links to additional media to reinforce the credibility of the news item, a bunch of idiots slap a tax on aggregators. Journalism these days means giving readers more sources for their news, linking them and accompanying items with other factors that build trust.
The indisputable value and blind trust readers had in their daily newspaper has now been usurped by alternative sources that add value to their news through algorithms that provide greater depth and breadth to news.
Facebook, also considered as a paramount service in today’s news reading habits, is also trying to limit content flagged as false in its news feeds, allowing users to flag publications as false or misleading and trying to limit its diffusion across the social network. As in Google’s case, Facebook claims to be a platform, not a publisher, but that doesn’t preclude it from trying to preserve an attribute as important as trust for its users. Again, a social mechanism, somehow similar to Google’s algorithm, trying to supplement the information being published with some sort of “collective value judgement” that increases its trustworthiness.
The journalism of the future can learn much from studies like Edelman’s. If you want to build confidence in your media outlet, you will have to work not just your SEO, avoiding grey areas, but also to avoid being punished with less visibility than you deserve, as well as doing everything to facilitate users with additional layers that give your news social validation. You should also provide readers with aggregated sources. Yes, the same aggregation that some media still stuck in the Pleistocene are fighting against.
(En español, aquí)
