The End of News
Legacy media has a trust problem, but
it’s not too late to solve it.
December 23, 2024,
3:27 PM ET
Americans have record-low trust in the media.
They’re reading traditional news less. Platforms,
too, have broken up with news organizations, making it harder for them to
attract readers to their stories. Many 20th-century media companies are
outmoded in a landscape where independent sites, influencers, and podcasters
are finding large, passionate audiences, especially among adults under 30. Surveying
this landscape recently, my colleague Helen Lewis wrote, unsparingly, “The ‘Mainstream Media’ has already
lost.”
I feel the same way. We are living through a period of deep
distrust in institutions, which many Americans feel no longer serve their
interests. There is a palpable anger and skepticism toward corporate media, and
many have turned to smaller publications or individual creators whom they feel
they can trust, even if these groups are not bound to the rigor and standards
of traditional outlets. Those who reject traditional news sources feel that
something needs to change and that legacy media organizations must find ways to
reconnect with audiences, listen to them, and win back their trust. The
question is where to begin.
Last week, I came across a paper by Julia Angwin. Angwin
is an award-winning investigative reporter and the founder of the news
organizations the Markup and Proof News. She’s known for her data-driven
reporting on privacy, surveillance, and algorithmic bias. As a recent Harvard
Shorenstein fellow, Angwin spent a year studying journalism’s trust crisis and
how the media might reverse the trend. She argues that the industry can learn a
lot from the creators and YouTubers who not only have found big audiences
online, but have managed to foster the very trust that the mainstream media has
lost. Because of this work, Angwin is in a unique position to diagnose some of
the problems in the traditional media ecosystem while, crucially, understanding
the work necessary to produce great journalism. I wanted to talk with her to
get a sense of what the media can learn from the creator class.
Charlie Warzel: The
paper establishes that there are three pillars to trust: People need to
convince others of their ability, their benevolence (or that they’re acting in
good faith), and their integrity. And you argue that creators, who have to
build audiences from scratch, are doing so with an eye toward these
trust-building principles, whereas traditional media takes their trust for
granted.
Julia Angwin: There’s
also the issue of how, in our current media environment, audiences confront our
work—these pieces of content—in ways that are completely isolated from the
brand. You can have reporter bios and ethics policies, but most readers are not
going to visit your pages to read them. So often the experience is just “I saw
it on Facebook,” or some version of “I saw it online.”
Warzel: Right, the
experience is information sporadically populated in a feed and not a
relationship between a journalist and an audience.
Angwin: That’s what
led me to really get interested in creators. Any little bit of credibility they
have, they tell you up front. Even if it’s a makeup artist on TikTok who’s
huge, she’ll tell you her bona fides, like that she’s worked at Ulta or some
beauty store. They like to lead with credentials, and then they demonstrate
their expertise: I’ve tried seven different eyeshadows so you can
figure out which one is the best one. This is a key distinction from
journalism. What journalism often does is, it tells you in the beginning which
eyeshadow is the best. The headline will be like X Is the Best
Eyeshadow, and the lead spells out the conclusion and what the piece will
argue—you don’t get to the evidence until closer to the bottom.
Creators flip it. They start with the question: Which one’s
the best? And then they show people, trotting out the evidence. They don’t
always draw a conclusion, and sometimes that is more engaging for an audience.
It builds credibility. And so it is just an entirely flipped model that I think
journalism really has to start thinking about.
Warzel: The creator
presentation you’re describing sounds much more prosecutorial to me. It feels
like how lawyers do opening arguments—We are going to show you this, we are
going to show you this, we are going to show you this. And by the end, you will
believe this about my client. Right? This is actually pretty
time-tested; it’s how lawyers build trust with an audience of 12 strangers.
Angwin: It’s also
similar to the scientific method. You start with a hypothesis, and you
say, I’m going to try to prove this. You have a hypothesis,
and then you’re going to test that. And it’s not a neutral hypothesis, right? A
hypothesis comes from experience and having an opinion on something, just like
the prosecutor has a point of view.
Warzel: In your paper
there’s a quote that spoke to me from Sam Denby, a YouTuber. He said, “We walk
through the evidence to get to the point. Sometimes we don’t even give a full
point, but let people come to it themselves.” One of the fundamental things that
I’ve noticed from creators versus traditional news organizations is that
there’s not always this rush to be so declarative. Podcasts, for example, are
quite discursive. Journalists are supposed to provide answers, but there’s
something audiences respect when they hear creators and news influencers
analyzing and discussing an issue, even when it’s not conclusive. My guess is
that audiences appreciate when they feel like they’re being trusted to listen
without being lectured. I feel like it has become harder for traditional
journalists to frame their work without sounding overly certain when describing
a world that’s often surprising and contradictory.
Angwin: It’s worth
looking at YouTube-video titles, because YouTube is really the most
well-developed creator space. It’s the ecosystem that allows creators to make
the most money. Look at YouTube titles, and you’ll see that a lot of their
headlines have question marks. They ask a question; they don’t answer a
question. And that is exactly the opposite of most newsroom headlines. News
organizations tend to have a very maximalist approach—What is our most
incredible finding? How can we just make the sexiest headline? And
audiences have learned to mistrust that, because it’s been abused by places
that put up clickbait. But even when it’s not abused, the truth is almost
always more nuanced than a headline can capture. I think asking questions and
framing work that way actually opens up a space for more engagement with the
audience. It allows them to participate in the discovery. And the discovery—of
new things, of new facts, of new ideas—as you know, is actually the most fun
part of journalism.
Warzel: I think that
participation is such a key part of this. You can see the more malevolent
version of this on the far right and in the conspiracy industrial complex.
QAnon is participatory media. Audiences play a role in the MAGA cinematic
universe of grievance over “wokeness.” But what does this participatory stuff
look like on the traditional-media side?
Angwin: In the creator
community, there’s this incredible policing, which is not always good. But all
the creators I talked to say that, basically, as soon as you put up a video on
YouTube or TikTok, there are comments immediately, and if you have something
wrong, they’re telling you. If you don’t respond and say, “I’m fixing it” or
address it, you lose trust.
Essentially, creators have established mechanisms for
having accountability interactions with their audiences and with other
creators. And it can go awry, and there is certainly creator drama that is
sometimes created just to juice views. But I think largely they feel
responsible to respond to their community in a way that journalists are not
required to, and, in fact, are discouraged from doing. A lot of newsrooms have
gotten rid of comment sections, because it’s actually really expensive to
moderate them, and time-consuming. On social media, journalists don’t always
have the freedom to respond when people critique them, or their editors tell
them not to get involved. One reason that people feel so alienated from
journalism is that they see these overly declarative headlines, and then when
they try to engage, they get stonewalled.
Warzel: This speaks to
a broader concern I have, which you address in the paper. You write that
“journalism has placed many markers of trust in institutional processes that
are opaque to audiences, while creators try to embed the markers of trust
directly in their interactions with audiences.” I’ve been thinking recently
about how many of the processes that traditional media has used to build trust
now read as less authentic or less trustworthy to audiences. Having editorial
bureaucracy and lawyers and lots of editing to make work more concise and
polished actually makes people more suspicious. They feel like we’re hiding
something when we aren’t.
Angwin: It’s a
terrible irony. I think it’s worth noting how audiences are now deeply
attuned—rightly so—to profit motives. The reality is that most creators are
their own stand-alone small businesses. And this reads as inherently more
trustworthy than a large brand or a huge media conglomerate. Audiences aren’t
wrong to see this. Plenty of media organizations are owned by billionaires, and
those people have their own politics. And that is potentially a detriment to
authenticity that journalists then have to overcome. I’m not naive: Creators
are performing authenticity too, but there is less to overcome in this sense.
Warzel: What’s ironic
to me is that you have this audience that is rightly suspicious of profit
motive and billionaire owners, and that sits alongside the creator model and
influencer culture, which is very nakedly enthusiastic about getting the bag.
In creator land, fans of influencers seem genuinely delighted to hear that
their favorites are making big money. I guess maybe this is a type of
transparency.
Angwin: That
transparency is so important. The one thing that creators get called out the
most about is trying to hide a sponsorship. So there is a bit of policing on
transparency going on.
Warzel: I want to ask
you more about how creators engage with their audiences. I see this with the
influencers I follow. It’s a performance in some sense, of course, but it also
feels like there’s some genuine work of rolling up one’s sleeves that signals
to the audience that they have a real respect for them and their opinions. And
that contrasts with the “voice of God” feeling that authoritative journalism
sometimes projects.
Angwin: Accountability
is so important. It is a problem in our industry if somebody gets something
wrong and the audience doesn’t see that they’ve suffered any consequences for
that.
One of the things that a lot of the creators told me is
that they commit an hour or two to engaging with the first comments on their
videos to make sure that they’re seen giving the community a feeling that
they’re being heard. Little things like this could begin to make a difference
in journalism, like investing in comment moderators. But it’s not just having
comments—it’s really seeing them as serving a real function. I’m not sure what
the right mechanism is, but audiences want some kind of mechanism for redress.
People who feel like they’ve been harmed or wronged by some coverage want and
expect to be taken seriously.
Warzel: There’s one
part of me that feels like we’re in a moment of low trust in institutions in
general, which means media organizations are swimming against the current. I
realize there are no magical solutions here to restore trust, but I’m curious
what advice you’d give to legacy media right now.
Angwin: Three
things. First is understanding these elements of trust that we need. The
audience needs to feel like they have reason to believe you’re benevolent. They
have to have reason to believe in your ability and expertise. They have to have
a reason to understand where you’re coming from—meaning no more view from nowhere—and they need to know what
they can do if you’re wrong.
None of these things right now are being addressed inside
the stories themselves. We have to understand that these stories travel on
their own, and they need to be embedded with stand-alone reasons for skeptical
audiences to trust the people who produced them. The way I’m experimenting with
this in my own work is by adding an “ingredients” label in each story. The
label says what the hypothesis is and what the findings are and the limitations
of the reporting and analysis. I’m not sure that that’s the right model, but
it’s an experiment in attempting to do this work. Being clear about those
elements of trust in the story, as opposed to just relying on a brand, is my
most important finding.
Item two is that actually we have to start taking creators
seriously—especially the ones who are doing journalistic work. We need to stop
worrying about how to protect our own brands and individual institutions and
focus on what we can do to make sure that important, trustworthy information is
flowing to the public. One thing I’m doing that’s been really interesting and
fruitful is building journalistic tools that creators can use to do their own
investigations. For example, the YouTuber Hank Green did a 30-minute video
about a tool I built that showed how many of his YouTube videos had been stolen
to build Claude’s generative-AI model. Now, if you look at my own channel, the
views are pathetic, but because I’ve built tools that other people used, it’s
become an extension of my journalism, and my work has been seen by millions. I
believe that journalists have to expand their thinking. The question should be, How
do I get my information out there? And maybe an answer is: It
doesn’t always have to be delivered by me.
Lastly, I just have to put in a word for the end of
objectivity. I think that the main problem of where we are right now when it
comes to trust is this idea that we have to be pure and neutral and have no
thoughts, but just be receptacles for facts. The more that we can transparently
bring our expertise and intelligence to the task, the better it will be for
everyone.
About the Author
Charlie Warzel is a staff writer at The
Atlantic and the author of its newsletter Galaxy Brain, about technology, media, and big
ideas. He can be reached via email.
