Basically what our mission is is to amplify journalism's commitment to fairness, accuracy, inclusion, and transparency.
A trustworthy press is the immune system of democracy. You need a vigorous press, basically holding the powerful to account and calling out lies, while realizing that it's a lot easier to lie than it is to tell the truth.
I'm joined by Sally Lurman, CEO of the Trust Project, and Craig Newmark, founder of Craig Newmark Philanthropies. We're talking trust, journalism, community, and of course, birds. This is Birds and Nerds. Craig and Sally, thank you very much for joining me on the podcast. I really appreciate it.
Yeah, I'm so glad to be here with you and with Craig.
Let's start with the Trust Project. Sally, I met you earlier this year and we talked a little bit about it. Tell me what it's all about.
Well, do you have a couple hours?
Thank you. Yeah. So basically what our mission is is to amplify journalism's commitment to fairness, accuracy, inclusion, and transparency so that an informed public can engage fully in civic life and thrive. Because today it's very hard to really find news that you know you can trust. And unfortunately that's not a new problem, but it's gotten a lot worse over time. So we really feel it's important to elevate trustworthy journalism out of everything else so that people can really use that information to make decisions about their own lives, their communities, and their governments.
And how does that practically work? Are you working with existing news organizations? Are you standing up other news organizations?
Yeah, thanks. So what we do is we work across three dimensions. And one is, yes, working with news organizations to help them deepen their integrity. And some may be already very good at it and others may need a lot of work, but either way everyone needs work in this area. So we help them integrate integrity across everything they do and build in these what we call the eight trust indicators. And I can tell you a bit about that more later, but it's a way to see who and what is behind the news. And then secondly, we work with technology platforms, so originally big companies like Google and Meta and Microsoft who wanted to elevate trustworthy news out of and surface it out of those streams of information that people were getting. And now more into spaces, we're working more into spaces where people are engaging with news, sharing links, and trying to integrate the trust indicators into those spaces so that when, and also the trust mark that's on all of our sites, so people more easily can tell, okay, this is how I can decide whether to trust it and this is trustworthy. And then the third piece is working more directly with the public or through our news partners and institutions like libraries that are really interested in making sure people have access to trustworthy information. Working with them to teach and train around these trust indicators, which are really just a tool to empower people to decide: is this trustworthy, is it not? Should I pay attention? Is it better just to pause and move on?
We'll get to those indicators shortly, but Craig, I wanted to bring you in here and ask you. I know this funding of like truth-tellers is one of the things that your philanthropy really looks at. What attracted you to this project?
Well, I'm looking for efforts that could be really effective in overcoming what scammers, fraudsters, bad actors talk about when they say they're going to flood the zone with. And the Trust Project has some possibilities there in terms of starting to talk about what are the indicators of trustworthy intent and behavior. If this could be enforced, that might be a way to overcome the flood of. So far, the most successful people in this regard are the editor community at Wikipedia, but I'm trying to help out where I can. I need to do a better job of it, but as a nerd, I may not be the right guy.
I don't know. A nerd with money who can go in and help editors and help journalists to kind of cut through that. If you said, I think that's a pretty good mission. What made you really go after that as a mission of your own though? Like why do you want to cut through it? I know I want to cut through it as a journalist. You're not a journalist. What makes you want to do it?
Maybe on an emotional basis, in Sunday school I was introduced to this commandment about not bearing false witness, which is normally translated as not lying. And I guess I internalized that real thorough. And then in high school US history and civics, 1970, I was helped in that I understood that, as I put it, a trustworthy press is the immune system of democracy. You need a vigorous press, basically holding the powerful to account and calling out lies, while realizing that it's a lot easier to lie than it is to tell the truth.
Yeah, you can say that again. And I mean, journalists work so hard to find the truth and report it and bring multiple perspectives to any issue so that people can decide. And actually, I didn't mention we have more than 300 news sites participating in the Trust Project who've gone through our whole training program. It takes about five or six months and they show the trust mark on their pages. They're in Europe, the US, Latin America, and Canada. And what I'm proud of is how they have stepped up, kind of getting to Craig's point, really stepped up to show like we are doing that work to find the truth and here's how we're doing it, and kind of not just throwing it out there, but showing, pulling back the curtain and showing the work behind it, not to brag, but to earn trust.
I feel that, and I've been a journalist since I was 20, and I have worked really hard to look, you know, double-check sources. And you know, still even today as an independent journalist I do that when I do my reporting around the future of work, which is what I do, you know, kind of as my journalism living. This Birds and Nerds podcast is my passion and my curiosity about the world around me, but I do try to do that. But I also have seen the erosion of truth out there on the internet, whether it's, you know, AI-generated stories. My husband told me one just this morning that he saw a speech, quote unquote, from Bill Clinton that was in his voice and Bill Clinton never recorded it and it was AI and it was, you know, a voice reading it off a page. Some of the words were his, but some of them weren't. And I think that helps, you know, erode trust. Is that the only thing? Is it the AI? What else is eroding the trust out there in journalists?
From my point of view, it's that again these bad actors, particularly scammers and fraudsters, who have flooded the internet with. Cory Doctorow talks about enshittification. And it's very hard to break through all that. Not many people have succeeded in doing so. That's motivating. For example, I'm talking with the CUNY journalism school and another party about helping them work together to figure out how to do really good audience development. You not only got to grow your audience, but you got to figure out how to grow beyond preaching to the converted. I don't know how to do that myself. I really am a nerd, but at least I know of the need to do that. And maybe I know a couple people who are good at it. So I'll work with them and I'll help fund them and exert whatever little influence I have.
And Sally, you mentioned the trust indicators. What are those? I mean, I think they can inform journalists, but they probably can also inform people seeking news.
Oh, absolutely. Like, we really have found, I mean, initially they were intended for newsrooms to develop and integrate. They came out of user-centered design, meaning that we could see the problems in journalism like more than a decade ago because, getting to your question earlier, there was in the move to the digital environment, journalists and news organizations made a lot of mistakes. So went in trying to match like clicks, grab all those clicks, run things like a series of celebrity photos or a series of mug shots of people who hadn't even been arrested, and blending news with opinion because we thought, oh well, that's going to, people want to hear that narrative. And so we really went out and talked to people about what it is that they value in the news. How do they decide whether to trust it? And out of that then we had a series of meetings with news executives, workshops, and said, okay, these are user needs and wants. How do we marry that with journalistic values? And so the eight indicators aim to meet user needs, the public needs, and also help news organizations uplift those fundamental values, those fundamental practices of ethics, of remaining focused on the public interest. And so there are eight, and we started with 38. We narrowed them down over 10, and they get to again like who and what is behind this news organization and how do we show you the work that's behind it. And number one, I'll just name, there's eight of them. I'll go through three for now. Best practices. So people ask this a lot about agenda, and like everybody aims to be impartial but everybody's got an agenda too, or all journalists aim to be impartial but everyone's got an agenda. So what's yours? Well, the agenda for newsrooms should be to focus on the public interest, and that's like the big differentiating factor between all these organizations that Craig's talking about and what journalism is, along with all the practices of journalism. So all of our news sites show what is their ethics policy, who owns them, how do they get funded, how do they separate their ownership and funding from their journalism, how do they protect their journalism from outside interests. Another one would be labels. So we heard people talking about, they told us, well, we might want opinion, we might want news, but we think journalists don't maybe know the difference because it's all blending together. So what we ask our news sites to do, and we're seeing it spread fortunately, is to really separate news from opinion and label it clearly. And we're really pushing hard too on labeling paid content. You see that label sponsored. What does that really mean? I would say people don't truly understand that that means that whoever paid for it has authority to say no, you can't run this or you have to change this. It's not like you go to the softball game, your kid's softball game, and there's a sign on the wall for the local drugstore and they don't get to control the outcome of the game. But that's essentially what sponsorship is. And I'm not saying sponsorship is bad. You can get good news stories that way, but it still is a type of paid content. And then just a third one that's become increasingly important in this environment where lots of people spout lots of things without support is methods and references. So one of our, many actually of our original interviewees talked about how was the story built, like what are your sources? Tell us how did you, how do you know it's true? And so what we asked for is beyond links really aren't that useful anymore embedded in a story. Like you should always see attribution then, like here's something someone's said, here's who said it, here's their qualifications. But if there's a link it could go anywhere. So we ask on stories that are maybe controversial, stories that have a lot of legwork, like investigative or enterprise stories we call them in-depth, to say like here's why we chose this story, here's how we went into depth on it, here's how many people maybe we interviewed or the other news outlets or the documents we consulted, and listing references. So that might be methods, here's how we went about it. References actually listing links to documents, to people's LinkedIn profiles so that you can check for yourself because people talk about I want to do my own research. Well, let's help them actually do research in a way that's safe and comfortable. And we do hope to work with partners like Wikipedia, who do such a good job of providing that kind of context.
That trusted source I think is really important. And you know, you talk about the number of newsrooms that have joined, you know, with your Trust Project, but I was disturbed to see the number from a Georgetown Center on Education and Workforce that said that by 2030 there'll be a decrease of about 3% of the journalism workforce and that would be over 20,000 jobs. And I believe from my own experience seeing that happening at a local level, which is really disturbing because people need that source of local news to feel part of a community. You know, Craig, you made donations to CUNY's graduate journalism school and then your second donation, which I really love, makes tuition free for half of that student body. What made you go into a journalism school for this? What are your thoughts on the profession and where it's going?
Well, journalism has a really good record for training a lot of people in trustworthy journalism, and then the track record is really good getting people journalism jobs, reasonably well-paying ones, and then graduating without a lot of student debt. We need to work on more of that because they need to fully fund the tuition-free programs. In general, CUNY over I think around 175 years has been really good for New Yorkers who might never get the opportunity to get an education to get themselves into the middle class or better. And so this way, in a small way, I can help improve trustworthy journalism and basically maybe be an example for other people with too much money to lend other people a hand.
What's exciting about this moment? I know there's so many awful things happening in regarding to news.
But there is a lot of philanthropy going into local news and a lot of people who are working really hard, a lot of journalists working really hard to stand up new organizations or build the ones they have and work hard to make sure that they're trustworthy. We get a lot of inquiries from them and there are jobs there. And I mean, yes, you're right. It's devastating to see the number of job cuts in the bigger companies, but there is a bit of a renaissance happening and hopefully we can sustain that. The dean at UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism said they had higher enrollment than ever this year. So, and then someone else just told me that they had been laid off a year ago and they said there's so many more jobs right now than there were a year ago that they were very excited. So I'm not saying that everything's perfect, but I do think if with the support of philanthropy, with the support of the public, which is so important to go directly to trustworthy news sites, I think we can rebuild this institution in a powerful way.
That actually makes me feel a little better because I kind of keep track of, you know, as an independent journalist, I do my own thing now, but I keep track of kind of the market out there because I have mentored some other younger people in, you know, smaller markets and that to try to help them kind of shape their careers. And I get disappointed when I see some of the pay and some of the job cuts. So that's at least making me feel a little better.
And I would also add that I have worked in local news part of my career, most recently about 10 years ago here locally in Los Angeles, and there was a lot of budget cuts which was a problem, and so we had fewer reporters and less interest in some of the stories that really affect the quality of someone's life, including work, education, and more interested in, as I think you know, Craig brought it up, as kind of almost that clickbait. Right? Here's something on your local news website that says, oh, you know, 10 celebrities who, you know, that seems to be a popular one.
And sometimes I kind of want to shift here because sometimes I say trust too quickly, but maybe we don't stop and think. And Craig, you have a new project out there called Take Nine, just to try to help people take that moment and think. Explain to the audience what Take Nine's all about.
Well, the focus is on more conventional everyday scams and fraud. What the behaviorists tell us is that when you're approached with something with some urgency, someone's trying to get you to buy something in a hurry, that's usually a bad sign and that you should take a few seconds to consider what you're doing before you actually do anything. That's proven to be good advice in my case and that of other members of my family. Now, getting this message across does require help from someone who has social skills which are far superior to mine. So we've engaged the Count von Count in this regard from Sesame Street. He's a lot more lifelike than I am and does have superior personality and charisma. I've been fighting online scams for 25 years and I have been counting for over 2500 years.
Hey, you don't look a day over 2200.
We are here to talk to you about the power of counting to nine. Counting to nine before you click, download, or share can help you spot and avoid scams. So remember, count before you click.
But the deal is to remind people what they can do, then to get it to more depth. Because frankly, a lot of the technical measures you can take to protect yourselves and your family and home against scams and fraud also helps protect you against cyber attacks. And when you internalize this stuff, that helps protect your job and actually helps protect the country. So the deal is all this stuff ties together. The Count does do a better job than I do, so I defer to his social skills.
