A recent Gallup polls finds trust in the media has reached a new low of 28%. It’s crucial now more than ever that journalists not only report the news, but also find new ways to connect with their fleeting audience
Enter Trusting News, a company working to help repair the bridge between news consumers who are exhausted by endless streams of information and the journalists who tirelessly work on stories.
Mollie Muchna, a Project Manager at Trusting News, led a panel at MediaFest25 doing just that, pointing out where and how journalists can begin to repair trust with their audience.
“News avoidance is on the rise, it’s becoming more and more of a problem,” Muchna said in an interview, “there are a lot of strategies and things that we can learn to better meet the needs of news consumers, while reaching more people.”
Munchna pointed out during the panel that some people avoid the news entirely. The Reuters 2025 digital news report, found that 42% of Americans avoid the news, but they still need to get information from somewhere. News consumers have shifted to taking in more information from social media rather than journalists.
One reason why people have moved away from interacting with the news is how much the general public is alienated from journalists. In 2019 the Pew Research Center found that only 21% of Americans had ever been approached by a local journalist in their life. The general public also feels like the content in the news is too complicated and too far removed from them, as shown in a Trusting News Study.
The way to fix the lack of trust and viewership is complicated. Muchna points out that reporters need to make it clear to their community what they’re doing, whether it’s on the street, through the stories they create, or in the lines of their publication’s “about us” page. Regardless, it’s people like Muchna who’ve worked in several newsrooms throughout her time as a journalist, who were drawn to Trusting News by how troubled she was about the lack of trust people had in her career.
“It felt so frustrating to do the same thing over and over again and getting the same responses from the community, so I really was drawn to working on the solutions part of this,” Muchna said, “How can we actually learn and take action to better serve our audience and fix this crisis of trust that our industry is in.”