A global effort to help readers identify reliable news
The spring issue of Santa Clara Magazine highlights the Ethics Center's Trust Project, including an overview on the origins of the project, a description of the eight "Trust Indicators," the four broad categories that comprise a news story, and insights and comments from Director of Journalism Ethics Sally Lehrman. Written by Steven Boyd Saum, editor of Santa Clara Magazine, and Deborah Lohse, SCU assistant director of media and internal communications, the article describes significant milestones in the Trust Project launch, including “Rebuilding Trust in Journalism” held at the Newseum in Washington in November 2017, and a west coast rollout, “The Trust Project: Using Technology to Restore Faith in the News,” held at the Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose in December. Among those joining Lehrman for those programs were Richard Gingras, vice president of news for Google; Cory Haik, publisher of Mic; Devin Slater, design director for The Globe and Mail; and Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist and supporter of the Project. The feature also describes the various categories of "news users," differentiated by the degree to which they scrutinize news sources and their depth of engagement.
“The journalists working on this project aren’t attempting to prescribe the perfect news diet for the public,” Lehrman commented previously for an article in The Atlantic. “That would be self-serving, pompous, and dull. No, we’re asking people to tell us what they want and need from the news.”