Credibility and cash flows: building trust with 21st century audiences with Joy Mayer

Solid reporting alone may no longer be enough to build trust with audiences. To stay relevant and financially sustainable, newsrooms need to rethink their engagement strategies.

How do you convince people to pay for your journalism, when their trust in news diminishes every year? And how do you convince your newsroom that solid reporting alone may not be enough, and they need to do more?  We talked with Joy Mayer, executive director and founder of Trusting News, an organization that tries to understand how people decide what news to trust and then turn that knowledge into actionable strategies for journalists.

Ioana Epure - Good reporting alone used to be enough for building trust with audiences. What has changed?

Joy Mayer - There's a lot that people used to take for granted about how journalism works. It used to be much simpler to decide what to trust: a few TV channels, a few newspapers. Now, your journalism is showing up in people's feeds, next to messengers who are much less credible, who do not have rigorous repor…