Methods to gain trust

There are myriad reasons why communities are distrusting of journalists; but, at the core of each one is the same concern: not getting the story right.

This doesn’t mean the journalist is not getting the facts straight. It means the reporter is not understanding the story on the community’s own terms.

Approach

Essentially, you want to empathize with the way a source looks at the world. This doesn’t mean your reporting needs to reflect solely this view–but it does need to communicate it, even briefly, before moving on.

Understanding a population on their own terms is ethnography’s specialty*.

So, gaining the trust of a community–whether that’s many people or just one source–means proving you “get” the people you cover.

This is not a one-time exercise. Trust, once gained, must be maintained. From story conception to publication, there are many opportunities along the way to gain and maintain trust, pulling from ethnographic methods.

Methods for trust building…

At story conception
While information gathering
In story writing
After publication

*Ethnographers, like journalists, may not always get it right; but, the discipline is committed to understanding cultures on their own terms.

Trust building at story conception

You can build trust before you have the next assignment. Go into the community you cover without an angle. Keep an open mind (more on that here). Between assignments (and during!) ask of your sources: what are some questions you want answered? In general, assume best intentions of people. Ask yourself: How can you unravel how a story topic makes sense to a community?

Ethnographers will use participatory workshops to help them understand a culture’s point of view and to build trust. These are a lot like community listening sessions. One method often used in these workshops is card sorting (aka card piling)¹.

What is it?

Card sorting does three things: It facilitates a good workshop (or interview); it helps in understanding how groups with dramatically different views make sense of the same topic; and it builds trust by inviting community members have their mental models reflected.

How it works

Pick an upcoming topic or theme from your editorial calendar. Have your community listening group list words of importance that come to mind on the topic (ask for definitions of any you’re not familiar with). Once a few dozen words have been collected, write them each on individual cards. Next, ask participants to individually sort the cards into piles. Reiterate there is no right or wrong answer. Then ask them why they chose to group these words together.

Outcomes

This helps participants explain how concepts are connected, and helps editors understand the topics on the group’s own terms. By having participants group items and relate concepts, authentic understanding is gained. This can better guide assigning stories, locating sources, and drafting comprehensive interview questions informed by the insider’s view.

Trust building while gathering information

The majority of touch points with a community happen while researching a story. This is your opportunity to build trust along the way. As mentioned in the methods for conducting meaningful interviews, there are many small gestures that make an impact in a source feeling like they can trust you.

Reduce apprehension

When people are interviewed they will naturally feel some apprehension about it. Getting them to talk helps. It doesn’t usually matter what a person talks about at first, as long as they are talking. This gives the interviewer opportunities to show interest, and to respond in a nonjudgmental way. These kinds of responses help communicate acceptance, which in turn engenders trust.

Although these approaches are best employed in aggregate, there’s one method that can drastically reduce a source’s apprehension: returning to them for input (as many times as your deadline will allow). Not only does this benefit the journalist (you can come back with intel from other interviews and ask recently informed questions); but, it takes the pressure off informants to get it right the first time, and makes them more of a news co-producer (keep reading for more on that).

A simple, oft-overlooked, way journalists can reduce apprehension is to set expectations. Beyond your name, media outlet and how to contact you, let your source in on how the news schedule works: will they hear from you again? When? Where and when will the piece be published/aired? How can they access it?

Locate a Key Informant

Ethnographers will cultivate a relationship with a key informant and meet with them over and over during their field research. Acting as a “base camp” of information, a key informant helps ethnographers gain trust in a community. For journalists, a key informant can introduce you to more sources and give clarifications and suggestions for where you can dig deeper. These informants may become not just news “sources”; but, co-producers–a more valuable role, and one that helps to foster community trust. Read about key informants for journalists here.

Trust building while writing

“What we need, is diversity in the true sense of the word, so that journalists bring a wealth of cultural perspectives, not only to the newsroom itself but also to their methods of news writing. Ethnography provides what is perhaps the most effective method for enacting strong objectivity.”
-Michael McDevitt and Janet Cramer²

Rethink objectivity

The prevailing wisdom touted in newsrooms and J-school’s is objectivity above all else. But rethinking this notion may actually go a long way to increase trust in news.

See the dirt on your lens

Ethnographers take time to reflect on their own bias, this is called positionality, and is most crucial when researching in a familiar space (like a home town, or a group with whom they share beliefs and values).

Most journalists report on their own culture—and if not a culture they share at first, it often becomes familiar in time (particularly for beat reporters, political reporters , etc…).

Gillian Tett, Financial Times reporter and anthropologist, calls this a “dirty lens.”

[J]ournalists, social scientists, writers and anyone who studies others for a living needs to remember: …we are all creatures of our own cultural environment, prone to lazy assumptions and biases.
Gillian Tett³

Here’s how to borrow from ethnographers’ self-reflexive tactics to consider your positionality:

Recognize you are shaped by culture. You are a human with biases, assumptions, and you come from a particular cultural environment. Before you write the story, reflect on who you are. Some things you could chew on: power (a.k.a. your position at it relates to the community you’re reporting on), think about what’s informing your assumptions, and the extent to which your reporting inadvertently contributes to societal inequities⁴.
Recognize your reporting/research is shaped by culture: The worlds you report on don’t stand apart from people, but rather are shaped by meaning systems that are negotiated and constructed through relationships. This means your understanding of these worlds is equally influenced by relationships. The simple fact of you reporting in the space is changing the space in which you are reporting on. For example, ask yourself: is this source giving me the answer they *think* the media wants?
Offset these biases. Your own lens will never be perfectly clean, but you can still try to see the world from different perspectives. This is the ethnographic approach: listen and look without preconception.
Acknowledge the limits of knowledge (related: recognize when interviewees assume you share their culture, think of statements like “you know how it is…”. Assume you DON’T know how it is. See> Awareness of abbreviation here). Gillian Tett says she jokes to colleagues that “on a good day, we journalists probably get 40 per cent of the ‘truth’.” Write your limitations succinctly into your story where you can.
Acknowledge your position. Be reflexive when you take notes, include recording how statements from sources land for you.
Include some of that self-reflexivity in your story. It can be as simple as a word or two disclosing your access to a group or your own cultural background.

Add a W

Don’t skimp on context when reporting. Find opportunities to tell the story from a holistic perspective. Media anthropology trailblazer, Susan Allan calls this “adding a w” to the traditional five-W reporting structure (with her “w” for perspective on the “whole”). Facts make sense only in relationship to other ideas shared by the group in which the facts are taking place.⁵

Add context based on anthropology’s cultural categories. Examining a topic through the lenses kinship, beliefs, identity, power dynamics, rituals (to name a few) will give a more holistic view. Human cultures are complex and diverse, so to omit the context of facts is to misrepresent (and misunderstand) a community’s story – ultimately getting the story wrong and losing a group’s trust.

Give sources a draft to review

Journalists are urged to check facts for accuracy and to protect sources if there is potential harm that might occur as a result of publication. But the verification of facts is too limiting as a prescription for ethnographic journalism. If journalists are to tell stories from the standpoint of a particular group, the individuals observed must participate to some extent in verification of how the meanings of their lives are portrayed. This would require some rethinking of journalistic habits, such as the norm that reporters should not allow a source to read a draft prior to publication⁶.

Ethnographers will give members of the culture they are studying opportunities to read portions of their ethnography or to comment on certain analyses before publication. Of course, this tactic may not work for all beats (anything that involves breaking the law, or scandals); some sources will be too busy or uninterested (celebrities); and in some cases, reviewing a draft may risk source protection (dangerous contexts; trauma survivors). However, if a source is willing to give feedback, even sharing a few relevant paragraphs for a single review will increase trust and accuracy⁷.

Regardless, for many editors, this is taboo.

But, journalism is already being pushed away from pure objectivity, and this may not be as bad as it seems. Read on.

Reporting with representation ≠ bias

The ethics of objectivity may seem like a no-go zone for innovation; yet, journalism has already become more interpretive, and for the better. We see this shift in the reckonings around representation in newsrooms.

Forward-thinking media organizations recognize that advocacy is an important part of journalism. Because of our modern news ecosystem (there are so many news outlets to choose from and news diet can be broad), there’s an argument that it’s no so much of a problem if you take an advocacy p.o.v. as it once was.

Beyond advocacy, is simply trying to understand the lives of marginalized people, on their own terms. This means representing people’s lives in non-stereotypical ways and showing empathy. Viewed in this way, that’s representation.

The idea that understanding a community in an intimate way is a form of bias is incorrect. Understanding a community on its own terms is subjective, yes; but, to know communities through their own lens is to accurately represent communities⁸.

Trust building after publication

With sources

The trust you gained only be maintained if you return to your sources to ask: Did I get it right? Offering to email key informants on publication date can also go a long way to maintain trust.

With Readers

If we—as news consumers and news producers—can get away from the idea that understanding a community in an intimate way is a form of bias, then we can accept news that includes advocacy, empathy, subjectivity, and representation. This means journalists will be expected/accepted/encouraged to add a personal touch to reporting.

Journalists are already being encouraged to do this on social media; but they are also being reprimanded by newsrooms’ social media policies for it⁹. There’s a disconnect between the requirement to be personal and to uphold standard of objectivity. It’s an impossible ask to require journalists to do both; but as discussed above, reporting is better for being representative.

Journalists know that being authentic and acting like a “real” person on social media is more likely to bring professional opportunities (ex: Personal branding is a currency that moves with the individual journalist—a currency worth quite a lot in a profession where layoffs loom and freelancing is commonplace) and improved interactions with the public. But, at the same time, such an approach also makes them more vulnerable to recurring personal attacks from harassers, and it increased the odds that they could inadvertently say something that gets them accused of bias and thus punished by their managers for failing to abide by strict policies on neutrality.

This friction point is where the mental health of journalists is being eroded. Online harassment is particularly rampant for journalists of colour, and women. This challenge would benefit from a culture-shift away from objectivity as the gold-standard in news; and towards a more accepted (both by the public, and the profession) of more empathetic approaches to reporting.