How to Earn Audience Trust: A Conversation with Joy Mayer

Joy Mayer, the founder and director of Trusting News, has spent a decade studying how audiences relate to journalism — including how their trust is earned and lost. A former professor at the Missouri School of Journalism, Mayer now helps newsrooms bridge gaps and build stronger connections with the communities they aim to serve. 

The idea for Trusting News, which was founded in 2016, came about when Mayer was advising a cohort of student journalists on their local reporting assignments. She said she noticed a troubling trend: community members did not accord journalists the same faith as she did in viewing them as forces for good working in behalf of the public interest.

“When I talked to journalists about that, they were depressed, they were defeated, and they had no idea what to do,” Mayer said. “And so I thought, ‘There’s got to be something we can do about that.’” Mayer embarked on learning about other industries’ efforts to earn trust and recruited other journalists to join her. This collaboration eventually became Trusting News.

Mayer spoke to the current class of Nieman Fellows about best practices for gaining trust, including taking care over word choices and exhibiting transparency in the news-gathering process.  Edited excerpts: 

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