@We Media: Tackling Trust: A To-Do List

So how are those issues of trust affecting ‘global society’? How do news organisations engage a non -trusting audience in the citizen media age? Authenticity, or at least the impression of it, is increasingly vital for news organisations.
The debate is US-focused: the rampant US blogosphere has been fed by a need to hear different perspectives to those offered by big media. Media Center’s Dale Peskin asks how we build trust when a whole range of voices, like anti-war, are not represented.
Musician and BBC Radio 1 DJ Nihal Arthanayak has slightly different viewpoint. He said people need to supplement their favourite blogs and web communities to get the full picture: “To get truth without the stench of an agenda you still need a real news site.”
The traditional role of gatekeeping is becoming more one of filtering. “Everybody’s a specialist – I’m a filter. If I want to find Sri Lankan hip hop, I’ll go to MySpace and there’s loads there.”
Reuters managing editor David Schlesinger said people attuned to blogs can hear a conversation much richer than it was before. (Reuters announced a partnership with Global Voices recently.)
“Now people are having a conversation with us about our reporting, exposing are mistakes and making us better. We have 150 years’ experience trying to gain trust.”
Global education? Democratisation of information? The debate gets inevitably utopian but there’s a to-do list:
— Being utopian, Nihal Arthanayake: “Interaction: Interact with those people who are disenfranchised at the moment – don’t just interact with people that have same access to technology as you do. That’s a cosy community – you have to reach out.”
— Karen Stephenson of the Media Center: “Collaboration: Those different schools have to collaborate to create trust.”
— David Brain of Edelman: “Control: Enter the dialogue. Gone are the days when you could control from the top down. This is a democratisation of information – there’s now an almost universal relationship between control and credibility. If you want to engage with this new dialogue you have to relinquish control.”
— David Schlesinger: “Transparency: Be clear about who you are, what you are doing and what your values are.”
Jeff Jarvis managed to squeeze in a request to deal with the possibilities of citizen media and not the problems – someone had to say it. Too often there’s that focus on the crisis, the concern about what’s being lost in the transformation and not enough action! “This is not an audience – it’s a room of ideas,” he said. More to-do lists this afternoon then?
Our We Media coverage is sponsored by Congoo

This article originally appeared in MediaGuardian.

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