Trust, Soap and Journalism. What’s so wrong with this sentence? And how to correct it

For the best part of five months I’ve been thinking deeply about building greater trust between readers, publishers and journalists. Clevr is the name of the tool that I, working with others and in the supportive atmosphere of CUNY’s Tow-Knight Entrepreneurial Journalism Fellowship, have come up with.
It has been a special time.
In essence, Clevr uses the author — the journalist — as the pathway for readers to discover great content. On one level, it is a celebration of journalists.
On another it is a way of keeping readers reading, increasing pages consumed per visit. And that of course is worth money to publishers.
Over the next week or so I will be presenting Clevr to a bunch of industry types and potential investors. Here’s hoping they like the idea as much as me.
Anyway, as I’ve been wallowing in my entrepreneurial bath, pondering the mechanics of trust and the metrics of time-spent on page, I’ve come across this soap. Yes, soap.

Read it: apparently this soap is, to quote, “not your ordinary vegetable soap”.
It is HONEST GENUINE TRUSTWORTHY and has been since 1838, barely seven years after Australia’s oldest continuously published newspaper, The Sydney Morning Herald, first hit the streets.
I mean, who knew? The soap’s been honest, genuine and trustworthy all along.
There we journalists have been all these years building and then losing our reputations for being honest, genuine and trustworthy, and all we needed all along was to claim, repeat and print the words. Soap. Indeed.
Of course, I’m being daft as a brush, trusted or otherwise.
I’m sure Bigelow’s soap is all it says.
My point is, it ‘aint enough. Not for journalists. We have to live it.
Soap buyers might well be happy to accept claims on trust at face value, but not readers. They’re different, even when they are the same.
That’s why publishers need something like Clevr. In fact, they will probably need more. There are many ways to regain the trust of readers or, as CUNY’s Jeff Jarvis has it, create services that audiences are willing to pay for — that they value at least as much as a bar of soap.
Putting Clevr aside for a minute, I’ve been investigating and thinking about a few other ways to build trust.
For instance, my gut tells me that properly verified data journalism, presented and explained well, would stand a good chance of being received as a trust bridge between readers and publishers.
To test my hypothesis, I recently asked an expert, well, four of them in fact.
Jonathan Stray teaches a course in computational journalism at Columbia University and has released an excellent book, The Curious Journalist’s Guide to Data. Get it here.
(My takeout: journalists don’t be scared of data: it’s counting not maths.)
I went along to the book’s launch and asked Stray and a panel consisting of journalism scholar Meredith Broussard, media innovator Mark Hansen and assistant managing editor of ProPublica, Scott Klein, whether there was any evidence that data journalism could help repair trust.
Sadly, the answers, though frank and honest, were less than conclusive.
Stray: “We don’t really know that this [data journalism] enhances trust.”
Klein: “It should do.”
Earlier in the discussion, Klein suggested that using the language and forms of the scholar — citations, sources and references — might assist journalism “to be taken seriously”.
That strikes me as a good idea (seriously, what’s the alternative?). Some media organizations — Vox, for instance — have experimented with such academic furniture and fact-checkers PolitiFact make citing links and sources a key component of their offering.

Another good idea, for an academic, would be investigate whether data journalism is better trusted than other forms of journalism.
For an immediate answer to that, I phoned a friend.
Sergio Spagnuolo is a Brazilian journalist who runs a data journalism agency called Volt. He’s also a CUNY fellow. I asked him if he thought data journalism could help bring back trust.
“I think data journalism could indeed help in bringing trust back to media outlets and journalists, in the sense that numbers can make more compelling arguments than declaratory journalism.
“If I actually took the trouble to quantify how many congressmen voted “yes” for a bill, that would be stronger than a quote of a congressman saying that “X” number of people voted “yes”.
“Media companies need to be more transparent to be trusted. Data is a good way to do that — it speaks for itself most of the times. Disclose your tables and people will know that you are transparent.
“But using data and dataviz is a resource to good journalism, not an end. If you use the data to confirm your bias and promote your cause, that is not trustworthy.”
Both Spagnuolo and Klein’s comments feed directly into the work of the Trust Project by the Markkula Centre for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University.
The project has carried out a series of interviews with users of news to discover what’s gone wrong and what can be done to fix it.
You can find its works so far from this link.
Using those interviews it has built a list of proposed indicators of trustworthy news at an individual article, website-wide or corporation level.
One of the recurring themes is that many readers want to know more about the journalist, who they are, what they’ve done and why they picked a particular story. (Come on down, Clevr!) Many would also like links to further reading.
Sally Lehrman, a science journalist who runs the Trust Project, cites five key components of trusted journalism: competence, ethics, predictability, consistency and positive intentions.
But, by way of music to my ears, she also notes that people want to know the author. “People are looking for a relationship with news organizations and the author,” she says. “We [the users] want to know where it’s coming from, we want to know the people behind the news.”
Much of what the Trust Project has unearthed is not startling nor is it that hard for a publisher to do. It’s more a question of willingness to spend time, resources and money on doing it or setting it up within an existing computer management system. Google is supporting the project and that can’t be a bad thing.
But as I’ve discovered over many years in this industry, publishing houses, especially large and/or old ones, are difficult beasts to change, especially when the immediate financial payoffs are not apparent. Sacking a journalist delivers far more tangible benefits.
Perhaps that’s why publishers need a little push along from the likes of something like Clevr. The alternative might just be so much more soft soap.

Peter Fray is a fellow at the Tow-Kight Centre for Entrepreneurial Journalism at City University New York’s Graduate School of Journalism. He is an Australian editor, journalist, academic and wannabe entrepreneur.