Joining The Trust Project
The Economist takes part in an initiative to help readers spot good journalism
Late last year, claims that false news shared on social media might have swung the American election swirled around the world’s newsrooms. Trust in the mass media had fallen to its lowest level since Gallup, a polling firm, began surveying respondents in 1997.
In December 2016 a bunch of coders, editors and designers got together to discuss how they could respond. The aim of the Trust Project, as their initiative was called, was somehow to give reliable sources of news more of a chance to find readers in the online chaos, and to work at earning the trust of new audiences. A team of my colleagues from The Economist attended that hackathon. Their idea was for publishers to build into their websites a standard set of trust indicators.
Today this idea has become reality — not just for The Economist but for more than a dozen other publishers around the world as well, including the BBC, the Washington Post, the Globe and Mail, Mic and La Stampa. We have all agreed to publish pages explaining how we work. You can see ours here. The new pages include policies on sources and fact-checking, as well as corporate information that we have long made available on our company site, such as details of our ownership and governance structure. We believe that being open about how we work will help us maintain the high levels of trust our readers have in Economist content.
The aim of the Trust Project is to help people spot good journalism — and to help machines, too. Platforms such as Facebook and Google crawl news sites for signals about their content in order to work out what’s relevant to their users. From today, these platforms have committed themselves to take into account the trust indicators we and other media organisations are publishing. The machine-readable aspect is made possible because the Trust Project’s collaborators have integrated the indicators with existing technical standards at schema.org. That means it’s easy for other publishers to do the same thing. We hope the initial dozen or so partners will grow into many more.
I’ve been working on this project for some time, and I’m so thrilled now to release it, and listen to your thoughts on it. Let me have ’em!
This kind of work takes a whole village. So here are the credits for everyone who’s helped.
Writers and editors: Daniel Franklin, Matthew Valencia, Tom Standage, Liz Mann, David Camier-Wright, Denise Law, Pip Wroe, Rosemarie Ward, Andrew Palmer, Tom Wainwright, Robert Guest, James Fransham, Zanny Minton Beddoes, Leo Mirani, Patrick Foulis.
Developers: Kathryn Jonas, Yasmin Green, Umberto Babini, Jacek Ciolek, Gary Lingard.
UX designers: Ana-Maria Bourceanu, Anna Coppola.
Designers: Sabrina Wellard, Russ Street, Sarah Leo.
PR: Lauren Hackett.
HR: Anne Foley, Cecelia Chahal Block.
Legal: Oscar Grut.
The Trust Project is funded by the Craig Newmark Philanthropic Fund, Google, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Democracy Fund and the Markkula Foundation.
Adam Smith is deputy community editor at The Economist.
