Trusting News research partner will focus Carnegie Fellowship on trust and polarization
Joshua Darr, part of the Trusting News research team, has been awarded a prestigious Carnegie Fellowship. The program offers scholars and writers support for work in the humanities and social sciences that addresses important societal issues.
This year, we’re thrilled to say that trust in local news will be one of the issues that benefits from their support. Darr, an assistant professor at Louisiana State University, will bring the resources of this fellowship to his work with our team.
My team and I always get excited when we can work with academic researchers. (Find links to previous research here.) They bring the ability to build important knowledge and insight in a complicated landscape of trust work. They help us ask questions about what trust is, how it can be measured, what we hope it does and how users respond to journalists’ efforts. They can test ideas efficiently, look for patterns, and identify aspects of newsroom culture that are important to address.
Researchers greatly enhance our ability to give newsrooms the data they crave — evidence that the trust-building strategies we’re imploring them to prioritize actually work.
Darr joined our project in 2021. He’s been eagerly assessing the observations of our Pluralism Network members about what types of story framing and language fuel polarization. The experiments he is running next will help us quickly determine whether our suggested changes based on the work of our partner journalists will actually change audience perceptions about our credibility.
The research team
Longtime Trusting News collaborator Sue Robinson is spearheading our newsroom research and taking a leadership role in imagining what impact the work can have on the journalism industry. She and I have worked together through our Citizens Agenda work in 2020, and more loosely through the community of engaged journalism before that. I’m thrilled to have her enthusiasm and insights helping steer our work.
Here is some information from each of our three research partners for our Road to Pluralism initiative.
Sue Robinson, University of Wisconsin-Madison
A former journalist, Dr. Sue Robinson of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Journalism & Mass Communication now studies and teaches about journalism norms and routines. Recently her work has centered around how journalists can build trust using a variety of engagement strategies aimed at developing different relationships within communities. She collaborated with Trusting News in 2020 ahead of the presidential election on a project called Citizens Agenda and decided she was all in on helping newsrooms figure out the best way to produce journalism so that people from all different walks of life could see it and accept it as factual. The Road to Pluralism project offers a vibrant testing ground upon which journalists can try out a bunch of very concrete, evidence-based approaches that are then analyzed by us researchers and turned into improved techniques. This kind of on-the-ground experimentation, which can be evaluated and then revised for newsrooms with all their constraints, could help transform modern-day practices. For more about Robinson’s work about trust in local news, check out her 2018 book Networked News, Racial Divides: How power and privilege shape public discourse in progressive communities and her 2021 co-authored book News After Trump: Journalism’s Crisis of Relevancy in a Changed Media Culture with Matt Carlson and Seth Lewis.
Josh Darr, Louisiana State University
Dr. Joshua Darr, an assistant professor of political communication at Louisiana State University, studies the political effects of changes in the local news environment with a focus on polarization and participation. His work is among the first to link presidential campaign activity to local news coverage and newspaper closures to polarized voting behavior. Given his interest in the tension between national politics and local news, Trusting News was a perfect fit. The evidence-based approach of Trusting News fits well with the experiment at the center of his book Home Style Opinion: How Local Newspapers Can Slow Polarization (2021, Cambridge University Press). Darr hopes these sorts of academic-practitioner partnerships can help realize the civic goods that local news can provide, even as the industry faces unprecedented challenges.
Patrick Johnson, University of Iowa
Patrick R. Johnson, MJE, a Ph.D. candidate in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Iowa, studies how news literacy, ethics, and deviance intersect with journalism practice, and how education supports democracy-building and journalism’s moral authority. He also explores issues of sex and sexuality in media. Trusting News is a natural fit for his work, especially as his dissertation attempts to understand the news literacy knowledge and skills of journalists, and what implications these behaviors may have on journalism practice and journalism education. The focus on public scholarship and collaborations between practicing journalists and scholars is what draws Patrick to Trusting News. The opportunity to be a part of a team that seeks out pragmatic and transformative practices to improve the news-ecosystem and relationships among journalists and their audiences is exactly what he hoped his work could do.
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.
