Trusting News receives funding from the Knight Foundation
The Trusting News team is thrilled to announce we’ve received financial support from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. A $150,000 grant will support our efforts to give more communities access to journalists and news organizations that work hard to earn their trust.
At Trusting News, we train and empower journalists to take responsibility for demonstrating credibility and actively earning trust through transparency and engagement. In a continual cycle of research, learning and sharing with the industry, we explore how to incorporate trust-building into journalism’s standards and practices.
We believe:
- Listening and humility should be central to how journalists operate.
- Communities deserve access to news that reflects their diverse lives and values and is responsive to their priorities and feedback.
- It’s up to journalists to invest in telling the story of what makes their own work (not the entire news ecosystem) valuable and trustworthy.
Our upcoming priorities
As we near the midterm elections, we will soon be sharing insights from our Road to Pluralism initiative (supported by New Pluralists and the Mercatus Center) and will be continuing to evolve that work.
In addition, we will invest in the customization and scale of our training programs, which the Knight Foundation’s grant will support. Over the coming year we will:
- Develop more training targeted at building trust with specific communities
- Develop more training to support people in specific roles within journalism
- Work with other journalism support organizations on programming for their members
- Develop more asynchronous training that can be accessible to busy journalists who need quick, targeted support
How you can get involved
We’d love to hear from you as we develop our priorities. Please email us at info@TrustingNews.org or get in touch on Twitter.
Do you provide training and support for journalists? We’d love to talk about how we could work together to bring trust-building strategies to the people you serve.
Are you in a newsroom? Drop us a line and let us know what obstacles you face as you work to earn the trust of your community. What do you wish they knew about you? What do you struggle to explain?
If you’ve worked with us before, reach out to say hello and let us know what you’re working on! And if you’ve built trust strategies into your journalism lately, update us on that using this form.
If you’re new to Trusting News, here are four places to check out our work:
- Subscribe to our Trust Tips newsletter to get one quick, actionable tip in your inbox each week.
- Check out our resources page for handouts and tip sheets.
- Sign up for our free, self-paced class hosted by Poynter.
- See our Start Earning Trust page for an overview of what we do.
About the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation
The Knight Foundation supports democracy by funding free expression and journalism, arts and culture in community, research in areas of media and democracy, and in the success of American cities and towns where the Knight brothers once had newspapers. Learn more at kf.org and follow @knightfdn on social media.
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.
