The quality oriented, the audience engagers, the transparent: Types of editorial trust-building in German news outlets

Abstract

Trust in journalism is highly relevant for society. Within the past years, especially during the COVID19-pandemic, trust in journalism became a recurring subject of public debate in Germany: Journalism is often vilified as ‘lying press’ and the legitimacy of traditional media is increasingly questioned. While in Germany, unlike other countries, we do not see a crisis in media trust, there nonetheless is a certain share of the population being skeptical towards traditional journalism. News outlets therefore need to ask themselves how to win back these sections of their audience and strengthen trust in their work. So far, research on media trust has largely focused on the audience – the journalistic perspective has hardly been examined. By conducting 29 interviews with German journalists, this paper aims to analyze which strategies news outlets pursue to cultivate trust in their work. Three main approaches to trust-building can be identified: The quality oriented, the audience engagers and the transparent. The results enable us to get a clearer overview on how news outlets try to regain and build their audience’s trust – which presents starting points for both journalism practice and research.

COVID-19 sceptics’ attitudes and expectations toward the media: Understanding the role of moral judgements on trust and distrust in journalistic communication on COVID-19

“…This, in turn, has consequences for future trust-building activities in journalism. Traditional media often lean toward quality management to win back trust (Uth, 2021(Uth, , 2022Zahay et al, 2020). In the light of our results, this strategy might need to be reconsidered.…”

“…These expectations, which are contingent on both the trustor and trustee as well as the history of the trust relationship (Fischer, 2016), determine the trustee's perceived level of trustworthiness; trustors' perceptions of trustworthiness rise and fall according to the fulfilment of their expectations by the trustee (Chen et al, 2011;Mayer et al, 1995). Expectations of journalism are often formulated and evaluated according to quality standards, which have a decisive effect on future media content (Fawzi & Obermaier, 2019;Uth, 2021Uth, , 2022. 5) Trust is a process involving risk and uncertainty (Das & Teng, 2004).…”