Our challenge – working to instil trust in the news

There’s an old trope about journalists jostling with used car salesmen and real estate agents for last place in most-trusted rankings.

In some cases – when tabloid hacks rifle through rubbish bins or voicemail baskets, or paparazzi hound people in the streets – this has been deserved.

But as we saw last year when a pandemic started ravaging the world, and this year when a tsunami threatened our East Coast, people flock to the media during times of crisis. The challenge for us is to generate that level of trust – where you turn to us for reliable, sometimes life-or-death information – daily. And it’s a big challenge.

A recent report from Auckland University of Technology academics found the overall level of trust in the media fell from 53 per cent in 2020 to 48 per cent this year. That’s less than half. Gulp, a sobering number indeed.

Of course, we are not alone in this, and media in the United States in particular has been afflicted by a certain someone’s ‘‘fake news’’ claim about every story he didn’t like, and the rampant spread of misinformation and disinformation.

But reading this report, I noted that the survey found trust in the news has declined because the media is increasingly seen as ‘‘opinionated, biased, and politicised’’. That gels with feedback I hear from readers, and it alarms me because we are trying our darndest to be as neutral as humanly possible.

Stuff last year adopted trust, not clicks, as its guiding metric. This will be a process.

So how can we earn your trust? For starters, we’re trying to be more transparent in our reporting processes. We’re increasingly telling you how we go about our reporting. If you’re reading stories online, you’ll see that we’re linking to the original source documents so you can check we’ve represented them fairly.

You may have noticed we’re publishing many more corrections these days. That’s because we’re correcting every single thing we get wrong and try to put it right. (Of course, we try very hard to get it right first time, but we are human.)

We start from a position where people’s names are used in stories – and if there are good reasons for them to be anonymous, like to protect their safety, we’ll tell you that reason.

In the past few weeks, we’ve begun insisting on names for all government and corporate spokespeople – because you have a right to know who’s fronting for your government.

I’m trying to get as many subscribers as possible into the building so I can show you how we decide which stories to cover, and who writes them. I can’t introduce all of you to our team in person, so let me tell you about our reporters one by one - see right.

Eat, Drink, Play

This exciting new Wellington festival started this week, aimed at supporting the capital region’s artists and hospitality sector after a tough year – and we are thrilled to be able to do our bit by being one of the festival’s sponsors.

There are more than 100 venues taking part, so I hope you’ll be able to enjoy some of the exciting events that are planned between now and May 16.

I, for one, am looking forward to going to the Highball Cocktail and Spirits Festival tonight at the Dominion Museum Building (with a location like that, I really need to go).

And if you have suggestions about how we can earn your trust, I’d love to hear them: editor@dompost.co.nz