Today's trust tip: Consider technology and product solutions to help you build trust
Hi there. Lynn here.
Sometimes journalists are willing to be more transparent about their work or are invested in building trust but can't figure out how to work the strategies into their actual journalism. Where does it go? What does it look like? How do we phrase it? And how do we make it seem seamless without interrupting the flow of the story?
As we’ve looked at successful (and sometimes unsuccessful) newsroom strategies and after reviewing feedback from our partner newsrooms, we’ve been wondering: How can technology and news products help journalists build trust?
This is an area we are excited to explore. With help from Emma Carew Grovum and the Online News Association, we recently led a brainstorming session with ONA Insights attendees to try to answer that question. Our goal was to envision product solutions to common journalism problems.
A few of the ideas imagined included:
- Use pop-ups for terms/concepts. This idea came up for a lot of different elements of a story. The music website Genius uses them as annotations and explanations for how their editing process works.
- Publish an in-house style guide. Making ethics and style guides public is the first step. Then, what if we added it to the CMS so it can be easily accessed and added/linked to in stories?
- Create a message bot. Could we create a messaging bot on our websites for users to ask questions about what they are reading?
- Use pop-ups to explain the cost to publish this story. Explain where money to support the newsroom comes from and how much money is needed to produce this type of story.
Pop-ups or annotations could also apply to topics. What about pop-up or expandable boxes providing more information about sources? CalMatters does that with politicians.
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