Winning trust amid the noise
The party of lies
Thirty years later, the story hit me with a new force. Here are the reflections of protagonist Winston Smith during his work at the Records Department of the Ministry of Truth, where he spends his grey days rewriting The Times:
"The Party said that Oceania had never been in alliance with Eurasia. He, Winston Smith, knew that Oceania had been in alliance with Eurasia as short a time as four years ago. But where did that knowledge exist? Only in his own consciousness, which in any case must soon be annihilated. And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed – if all records told the same tale – then the lie passed into history and became truth.”
In this age, where opinions and facts blur, where big tech companies collaborate with political powers, and misinformation is deliberately used for economic and political gain, Winston Smith’s world feels far closer than I could have imagined 30 years ago.
We fight daily for attention and trust, for influence and power. The traditional institutions – politics, the rule of law, the media – seem to be losing to the irresistible pull of social media. Trust in traditional media is low and declining year after year. Those who already know us trust us. But the gap with people who do not subscribe to any of our titles is huge.
"We’re embedding trust as a core value"
Thomas Thelen, editor-in-chief, Aachener Zeitung
Trust is important – no, essential – for the future of journalism. Without trust, even the best journalism will not attract readers. That is precisely why building and maintaining trust has been a central focus at Mediahuis over the past year. And that is why we joined The Trust Project.
The Trust Project was founded in 2014 by American journalist Sally Lehrman. The goal? To strengthen readers’ trust in journalism through a structured process and clear trust indicators. At the end of this process, you receive the Trust Label, but more importantly, you embed trust as a core value within your organisation.
Mediahuis Aachen participated in this project alongside Mediahuis Luxembourg, Mediahuis Ireland and Mediahuis NRC. We invested significant effort in implementing the trust indicators developed by Lehrman. These indicators are a set of standards that help news organisations demonstrate their transparency and distinguish high-quality journalism from less reliable sources. This includes details about the authors and the organisation, the research methodology and guidelines for correcting errors.
We not only adjusted internal standards, we also actively involved our readers in the process to gain their trust. They should better understand how we report and why, through insights into our working methods and the high journalistic standards we uphold.
After nearly 12 months in The Trust Project, the first phase is almost complete. We have conducted training for our editorial team to ensure that every journalist understands the importance of transparency and credibility. Additionally, technical adjustments are being made to our website to visibly integrate the trust indicators and clearly inform readers about our working methods.
The process has been very intense and insightful. But for us, the label is not the finish line. Aachener Zeitung remains fully committed to strengthening readers’ trust and setting an example of responsible journalism.”
Echo chamber
People who trust us are generally more highly educated, have higher incomes and are more often left-leaning, according to research by Motivaction. They are also older. Younger people show far less interest in regular news. And the lower the interest, the lower the trust – meaning we seem to be stuck in a negative spiral. That’s worrying – and not just for the future of our titles.
The irony is that those who turn their backs on traditional media often trust the flow of half-truths and outright lies they receive daily on X, Instagram or TikTok. Conspiracy theories spread like wildfire, whether about people eating dogs or the “truth” behind 9/11.
“Ironically, those who turn their backs on traditional media often trust the stream of half-truths and outright lies on social media”
This is a direct threat to public health. The nonsense spread by the current president of the United States about injecting bleach to fight Covid-19 was taken seriously by some. And the message from popular influencers that breast cancer screening is harmful and eating clay is good leads to unnecessary deaths.
At a more abstract level, the lack of trust in traditional media threatens democracy. Those who rely solely on unfounded online hype are trapped deeper in the bubble of their own beliefs. This leads to a politically unstable climate, mutual distrust, less understanding of “the other”, declining solidarity and growing polarisation.
"How do we ‘do’ trust? Stick to the basics and be transparent"
Cormac Bourke, editor-in-chief, Mediahuis Ireland
Our audiences generally love what we do, but they often don’t understand how we do it, or why we do it a certain way. The process of making journalism has not necessarily changed. Let’s not lose sight of the basic standards for journalists, to which we still adhere.
First things first. If the choice is between being right and being first, then be right. But better to be right and be first. That also means right in interpretation, context and meaning.
Checking and double-checking the facts of a story will always remain a huge part of the reporter’s function. More sources for more insight. More information from identifiable sources. Always offer an opportunity for all sides to comment. If news editors interrogate stories on the finer points, it’s also up to them and to the sub-editors and key production staff to challenge and interrogate the facts.
We are increasingly conscious of the meaning of each story – a headline might be technically correct, but is it correct in substance? Again: right in interpretation, context and meaning. Let’s not give our audience an opportunity to doubt what we do.
What has changed is how transparent we are or at least try to be. We have in recent years developed clear public-facing policies governing our journalism, our editorial code of practice and how people can contact us.
There are many routes for the audience to query a story. We can be contacted directly, we can be contacted through our online complaints form, we can be contacted through customer care. We take every complaint and communication seriously and try to respond to all of them in a timely and reasonable manner.
One of the fundamental mistakes we can make as journalists is to try to pretend we don’t make mistakes. Even journalists with supreme expertise can miss a nuance and misunderstand a meaning – we are unlikely to be as expert as the experts. However, our job is to try to explain the world to the people who live in it.
Recently, to improve transparency, we have updated our corrections policy – in line with our work towards partnership with The Trust Project – to make sure that when a story is corrected, a footnote is included concerning the correction.
Instead of simply trying to be seen to be right, it is just as important that we are seen to be able to hold our hands up and be seen to be wrong.
Preaching to the converted
The recent Maccabi riots in Amsterdam are a sad example. Even before anyone had gathered the facts, far-right parties were exploiting the events for their own political agendas. Geert Wilders was the first to react on X, and his message coloured the subsequent coverage. The media and politics were trapped in his frame, and that frame unnecessarily heightened the integration debate in the Netherlands. When NRC – unfortunately only at the second attempt – reconstructed the riots in detail, a much more nuanced picture emerged of what had happened that night.
“The foundation of our work is truth-seeking. Amid all the noise and framing, we must uncover what’s really going on”
This is exactly what we must do: search for the facts. And when those facts aren’t clear yet, we must name what we don’t know. The foundation of our work as journalists is, after all, truth-seeking. Amid all the noise and framing, we must search for what’s really going on. We must seek out multiple perspectives – and we must loudly amplify those voices.
We don’t always do this well enough, and I also hold myself accountable. We struggle with our stance on the platforms of tech companies. Should we stay on X and Facebook, or should we leave? Personally, I don’t believe in leaving – we must be present everywhere now to increase our impact. If Meta announces it’s firing its fact-checkers, we must step forward. Because we will continue to check the facts.
"We gain trust through sharing our process"
Roland Arens, senior consultant & former editor-in-chief, Mediahuis Luxembourg
During our first year in The Trust Project, we realised that transparency was the common thread running through all of the project’s guidelines, the indicators. The editorial teams are being challenged to explain to their readers how stories are created, how they choose topics, how they check sources and how they do their research.
An important step is to evaluate all the ethical and editorial guidelines that journalists must follow in their daily work. These standards are compiled into a Best Practices document, which is the bedrock of our work with The Trust Project. The document is published prominently on our platforms and is accessible from every article.
The Best Practices page also includes a section on how we go about correcting mistakes and background information about Mediahuis Luxembourg as a publisher, the history of our newspaper, and our main sources of revenue, including government support we receive. Ideally, this will mark the beginning of a dialogue with our readers about the fundamentals of our journalism.
Trust grows only if our journalists consistently apply transparency measures. That is why we train all members of the newsroom in the deontological requirements of The Trust Project, whether during the onboarding process for new hires or later through workshops. We have also enhanced all of our authors’ profile pages, designed to help readers assess a journalist’s expertise on a particular topic.
We pay special attention to our use of AI. We disclose when and how AI tools have been used to create graphics and how we use AI for article translations. A small but important trust-related feature in the CUE newsroom platform will allow us to label articles so that readers can immediately see whether they are interviews, opinion pieces or investigative journalism. More importantly, it enables us to make a clearer distinction between commercial and editorial content.
In this quest for transparency, we see an opportunity to regain lost trust or – even better – to strengthen the trust that already exists.
It is more important than ever to be present in as many places as possible – even where people don’t believe in us. We don’t do this by preaching to our own parish at conferences or in annual reports. Instead, we do it by showing ourselves with the best news apps, with smart marketing, at events where our journalists are on stage in front of packed audiences, with more podcasts and social videos to reach new and young audiences.
By showing who we are and what we do, we win their trust – against all the odds.
