“Listening Literacies” as Keys to Rebuilding Trust in Journalism: A Typology for a Changing News Audience

ABSTRACT

Using in-depth interviews and textual analyses of trust-building projects as case studies, this research explores the links between trust and news literacy. The major contribution includes a contextualized definition and formal typology for the literacies to come out of these initiatives and programs, which are well-funded by foundations, technology companies and others. In these trust-building strategies, we are asked to reimagine who is responsible for information literacy so that mainstream journalism can be revitalized. Four dimensions of news literacy for trust-building in public information exchange emerged from this dataset: civic consumption, amateur (co-)production (sharing), professional information production (newsrooms), and algorithms/technology. We find that the notion of a “listening literacy” within these strategies has application for not only K-12 schools, universities and “regular” people, but also for journalists and media platforms to restore trust in accurate information.

KEYWORDS:

• Media literacy
• news literacy
• journalism
• trust
• education
• news
• audience
• digital

Acknowledgements

The authors thank the editor and the anonymous reviewers for their feedback on this manuscript as well as several undergraduate UW-Madison students who worked on data collection: Enjoyiana Nururdin, Amira Barre, Devon Wanasek, and Seline Wiedemer. In addition, Sue Robinson acknowledges the work done by both the Field Day Lab and her partners on the Citizens’ Agenda project: Hearken, the Membership Puzzle Project and Trusting News. This research was partially funded by the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the Baldwin Wisconsin Idea Endowment as well as indirectly from Democracy Fund.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Field Day is a lab and studio at UW-Madison that researches and makes learning games. Lead by David Gagnon, their games’ projects are built in partnerships with world-class subject experts and cohorts of teacher fellows. Their games are publicly distributed for free into classrooms all over the country.

2 For these two projects combined, about 200-plus hours were spent participating and observing, serving as the journalist and researcher consultant on both.

3 See “The Checkology” at https://checkology.org/

4 To give you an idea of how much money is being funneled into these trust-building projects right now, Craig Newmark alone was responsible for infusing more than $40 million between 2015 and 2020 into journalism initiatives like these.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Baldwin Wisconsin Idea Endowment Fund; University of Wisconsin-Madison Foundation.