Reuters Institute wins Facebook support for new project
What kinds of digital news do people trust, why do they trust it, and what can publishers and platforms do to help people make decisions about what news to trust online? A new £3.3m ($4m) grant from the Facebook Journalism Fund will support a three-year project by the Reuters Institute for the study of Journalism (RISJ) investigating who, how, and why we trust digital media.
The project will involve different forms of research, including both qualitative and quantitative methods and ongoing engagement with professional journalists, publishers, and other relevant stakeholders by offering two fellowships for journalists interested in working on trust to join RISJ in Oxford, and series of workshops with industry stakeholders, and collaborations with other relevant parties.
The project team, led by Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, Director of RISJ and Professor of Political Communication, and Richard Fletcher, Senior Research Fellow, will begin work in the summer of 2020.
Prof Kleis Nielsen said: 'Many publishers and platforms face a profound crisis of confidence, and recognise that the long-term viability of both their mission and their business in part rests on whether people will trust them. The Trust in News Project is a unique new effort to understand the drivers of trust around news –a finding that I suspect won’t always make for comfortable reading– and help identify actionable, evidence-based recommendations for how to demonstrate trustworthiness and build trust with different communities in different contexts.'
