RJI Product Fellow Samantha Walker joins Trusting News
Trusting News is excited to welcome Samantha Walker to the team this summer!
Originally from Joplin, Mo., Walker is currently entering her third year at the University of Missouri, where she is working toward a journalism degree with a focus in broadcasting. She has received multiple awards and honors for her work in journalism, including the Hise Green- RW Baker Optimist Awards: TV Production Student of the Year and the Missouri Broadcasters Association scholarship.
Walker is joining the team through a Student Innovation Fellowship hosted by the University of Missouri’s Reynolds Journalism Institute. (Trusting News began as a project of RJI and continues to be co-hosted by the institute.) The fellowship places Mizzou journalism students with a news organization to work 30–40 hours per week in a summer product fellowship. Read more about the fellowship here.
At Trusting News, we are focused on working with newsrooms to experiment with possible solutions to the declining trust in news. Usually, those involve actions journalists choose to take day-to-day. But we also are curious about the systems and tools we use to do the work, and we know the journalists we work with are, too.
We’ve been wondering more about how technology and news products could help journalists rebuild trust with their users. We moved from wondering to action last year with help from Emma Carew Grovum and the Online News Association and led a brainstorming session with ONA Insights attendees to try to answer that question. Read more about what we learned during that session in this Medium post.
Having Walker on the Trusting News team this summer will allow us to dive even deeper into this work and hopefully develop some products that will help us better train journalists on how to build trust with their audiences.
If you have any ideas on products you think would help you learn about building trust, being more transparent with your audiences and engaging with your communities, let us know by sending an email to info@TrustingNews.org or on Twitter at @TrustingNews.
A Q&A with Samantha Walker, RJI product fellow for Trusting News
Learn more about Walker and what she hopes to accomplish this summer by reading the Q&A below.
What are you most looking forward to working on this summer with Trusting News?
I am beyond excited to be working with Trusting News this summer! I have always been interested in working with nonprofits, but have never really seen a great opportunity for me to do so in the world of journalism. I am looking forward to working with a team of well-respected individuals who share similar goals for the field as me. Transparency has been an aspect of journalism I have held close to my heart throughout school, and I am thrilled that I get to work with people dedicated to it just as much as I am. There is so much for me to learn from the Trusting News team and community, and I cannot wait to grow as an individual and a journalist through this experience!
What are you hoping to learn more about through this fellowship?
Through this fellowship, I am hoping to learn more about how to create products that help both newsrooms and audiences. All of my past experiences in journalism have been as a reporter and writer, and not really as a product thinker. I am hoping to learn about ways that I can improve experiences for audiences starting in newsrooms. With Trusting News, I am excited to think of new ways newsrooms and journalists can become more transparent and gain back audience trust. There is so much I can learn, and I know it can have a lasting impact.
How do you think news products can help newsrooms build trust with their audiences?
Products offer a lot of opportunities to help newsrooms build trust with the audiences. I personally believe that one of the main purposes of the product is to improve experiences, both for newsrooms and journalists as well as audiences. Great products allow for newsrooms to become more transparent, whether it be through showcasing their processes, transparency in advertising, or by more clearly marking their content. Great products also allow for newsrooms to connect more with their audiences, making media seem more approachable and journalists more accessible. When you put increased transparency and improved connections together, we are able to improve trust with audiences.
Describe a project you have worked on that you are proud of.
A project I have previously worked on that I am proud of is a documentary on the Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps (JROTC) program in my hometown of Joplin, Mo. They were celebrating their 100th anniversary, and I worked with the members of the organization to put together a documentary that told the story of the program. I was proud of this project because I was able to connect with current students and a large number of alumni to learn about their experiences in the program. Despite the fact I was never a member of JROTC, I was able to create a project that meant so much to people and was presented to a large banquet of alumni and local representatives. To me, that is the part of journalism that means the most. I love being able to connect with people and create projects and stories that have an impact and leave an impression, and this documentary was one of the first things I have done that seemed to do that.
What do you hope to do after graduating?
After graduating, I hope to become a broadcast reporter at a local station, and one day work to become an assignment editor. Local journalism is something that has had a profound impact on me and has definitely influenced my current career goals. I hope to be able to invest in local journalism and use my training from this fellowship in my day-to-day life as a journalist. After graduating, I hope to use what I learn from this fellowship to better connect with audiences and help bring back trust to local newsrooms.
At Trusting News, we learn how people decide what news to trust and turn that knowledge into actionable strategies for journalists. We train and empower journalists to take responsibility for demonstrating credibility and actively earning trust through transparency and engagement. We’re co-hosted by the Reynolds Journalism Institute and the American Press Institute. Subscribe to our Trust Tips newsletter. Follow us on Twitter and Facebook. Read more about our work at TrustingNews.org.
