Six newsrooms joining Trusting News’ Newsroom Partner Program

Trusting News is welcoming six newsrooms into our Newsroom Partner Program. The program represents the highest level of support we provide newsrooms.

The following newsrooms will be joining or continuing the program:

• WNYC (public radio station in New York City)
• KMTV 3 News Now (CBS affiliate in Omaha, Nebraska)
• Rochester Democrat and Chronicle (newspaper in Rochester, New York)
• The Keene Sentinel (newspaper in Keene, New Hampshire)
• The Shawnee Mission Post (hyperlocal online organization serving Johnson County, Kansas)
• Atlanta Journal-Constitution (newspaper in Atlanta and a continuing newsroom partner)

With these partners, Trusting News plans to:

• Help newsrooms be transparent about newsroom values, ethics and their reporting process.
• Develop innovative and helpful ways that transparency messages can be shared within day-to-day reporting content.
• Help newsrooms create trust elements for their on-air news products that discuss the following issues: misinformation, bias, fairness and ownership.
• Develop engagement processes and best practices focused on how journalists can continually gather feedback and ideas from their communities.
• Help newsrooms reach new, more diverse audiences.
• Develop new strategies for how a newsroom can approach crime coverage and share that approach with their community, with a focus on helping the community find solutions and helpful information to keep them safe vs. mug shot galleries, police blotters and other attention-grabbing crime headlines.
• Help newsrooms create and stick to using consistent labels for their content on all platforms (opinion vs. news, dates, descriptions of who the author is, etc.).
• Create videos explaining reporting decisions and elements of the reporting/editing process.
• Create proactive strategies and content to inoculate people against the idea that a newsroom is part of the “fake news” or liberal media.

About our newsroom partnerships

The partnerships will involve regular meetings and expectations for creating public-facing trust content. The content the newsrooms create helps us learn more about what builds trust within communities and allows Trusting News to share what we are learning with the broader journalism industry.

Trusting News has a history of providing newsrooms with this ongoing, one-on-one support to help them build trust with their communities. Through these partnerships, the newsrooms and journalists we have worked with have, among other things, added Trust language in their on-air products, explained their election coverage, explained their news values as they relate to issues like January 6 and critical race theory and shared their approaches to covering crime, investigations and COVID-19.

Follow the work

We look forward to working with these newsrooms and sharing what we learn with the journalism industry. To stay up to date on our work, be sure to follow Trusting News on Twitter and subscribe to our newsletter. Announcements related to future opportunities to partner with us will also be shared to those platforms.

What the new partners are hoping to accomplish

The Keene Sentinel

“We’re thrilled to partner with Trusting News, an organization we value so highly and have turned to for advice many times. Building more transparency into our everyday work, and giving our community a deeper look into the differences between news and opinion content, as well as our decision-making processes, are top priorities for our newsroom.” — Cecily Weisburgh, Executive Editor-Digital, The Keene Sentinel

Shawnee Mission Post

“Many people come to our work with preconceived notions about ‘the media” and suspicions about what we do. While we may know how seriously we take our duty to be straightforward and factual, we can’t expect our audience to know that without working to communicate our values to them. Trusting News is the preeminent organization working on this issue, so we’re thrilled to have them guiding us on how to proactively communicate our values to our community” — Jay Senter, Founder and Publisher, Shawnee Mission Post

Rochester Democrat and Chronicle

“The Democrat and Chronicle team recognizes that the future of local news depends on serving the whole community, something that only happens if we can repair relationships and build trust with members of marginalized segments of the local population. In particular, we need to be present and we need to be listening in neighborhoods we’ve historically neglected or mischaracterized. Our partnership with Trusting News ensures we will have a sounding board and wise counsel on our upcoming project investing in a cohort of BIPOC young people committed to social and cultural projects in a Rochester neighborhood with a historic degree of disinvestment. There is much we can learn, so that our journalism becomes a contributor to the civic good in this neighborhood and so that we build productive and lasting connections with future sources, readers and advocates for local journalism that is three-dimensional, solutions-oriented and inclusive.” — Michael Kilian, Executive Editor, Rochester Democrat and Chronicle

WNYC

“WNYC is thrilled to be a Trusting News partner newsroom. Public radio has always ranked high for having the support of loyal audiences, but we also know that we can’t take that relationship for granted. We’re excited to think deeply and listen hard to new ways to explain our work to our listeners and readers, and for them to engage with us on the issues that are critical to their lives.” — Audrey Cooper, Editor in Chief, WNYC

KMTV 3 News Now

“I’m deeply concerned about levels of news literacy in the United States and how that intertwines with the lack of trust many people have for legacy news media. We can’t have a functioning democracy without an informed electorate, but big chunks of the electorate don’t understand how we work. Our station management and ownership are interested in deeper engagement with the community and building trust in our reporting, so this seemed like an ideal time to pursue a partnership with Trusting News.” — Katrina Markel, Digital Content Manager, KMTV 3 News Now

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

“The AJC is investing in our crime and public safety coverage in the midst of a now years-long uptick in violent crime, specifically homicide. Our large, diverse community deserves to have a fruitful conversation around facts in order to understand the lines of accountability and to understand whether deployed solutions are working and whether proposed solutions have a chance at working. In the background of this is a secession campaign, where some in the city of Atlanta’s wealthiest community are attempting to leave the city so it can build a new police force specifically for those wealthy neighborhoods. Misinformation is a tool often used by the secessionists. Therefore, our goal is to make the public understand what we do and why. We will do that with a new toolbox that explains our policies and our goals and emphasizes our leadership role and commitments in our public discussion.” — Leroy Chapman, Deputy Managing Editor, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

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.