Reinventing the Big Tech vs journalism dynamic: trust and integrity

The digital convergence has upended the news media’s traditional business model while at the same time online disinformation has become an issue of global concern. What if both of these problems could be remedied through partnerships between Big Tech, big business and journalism that design for trust and integrity and creating a framework that will help sustain small and independent news outlets around the world?

“Trust initiatives” are striving to build a stronger digital news ecosystem and to ensure that users have access to high-quality news within the platform-mediated information ecosystem even as Google and Facebook create their own products focused on news media. This session will examine several of these efforts to build trust in reliable news sources, and what they need to gain traction or shift course. By critically examining a range of initiatives from different perspectives - tech platform facing, consumer facing, and civic tech initiatives – we’ll hone in on what’s working with respect to projects such as the Journalism Trust Initiative, Trust in News, Project Origin, Ads for News, Trust.txt, JournalList, the Trust Project, among others. We’ll also explore how to leverage the properties of the technologies and platforms in which journalism is embedded, and how these could be integrated with Google News Initiative, Facebook News and its new “Creator” product, and other platform-designed systems to provide greater coverage and access for small and independent media.

In this conversational panel we will explore the different approaches and how do they relate to trust online. What are the needs they’re addressing, and what are their implications for journalism? Are these approaches scalable? Are they relevant for non-Western media? How do more localized efforts interact with the global initiatives?

Organised in association with Global Forum for Media Development.