Author of 'The Future of Trustworthy Information'
Media executive, CEO & business journalist
Welcome to In Reality, the podcast about truth and the media with Eric Schurenberg, a long-time journalist and media exec, now the founder of the Alliance for Trust in Media.
It’s not exactly news that the traditional news business is in decline. Most distressing to those of us who grew up in the profession: that audience levels of trust in the work we do has dropped to the lowest levels ever recorded.
Today’s guest, Julia Angwin, back for a second time on In Reality, is like Eric a product of the traditional news business. She worked at the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, and also founded startup newsrooms like the Markup and, most recently, Proof News. But that’s not why she’s here today though…
Julia recently penned research for Harvard’s Shorenstein Center about what traditional newsrooms can learn from online influencers about trust. According to her paper, you earn trust by convincing others that you are competent to do what you say; that you have integrity and that you have their best interests in mind.
Julia and I discuss how influencers support those beliefs about themselves, without benefit of institutional brand names; how traditional newsrooms squandered trust; and ,what journalism needs to do about it.
Read Julia’s Paper! The Future of Trustworthy Information: Learning from Online Content Creators
Takeaways
Transcript
Eric Schurenberg (00:01.634)
Julia Angwin, welcome to In Reality.
Julia Angwin (00:04.678)
It’s great to be in reality because… it’s so rare these days.
Eric Schurenberg (00:07.758)
Now, in reality, faithful in reality listeners have heard you before. And so they know that you are a long time accomplished journalist with sort of a major in technology. You contribute to the New York Times on that topic. You’ve created two different digital newsrooms focused on news around tech, the Markup and your new baby, Proof News.
The occasion for this is report you did that you alluded to in your last conversation on in reality about trust in media, which obviously is a focus of in reality and the Alliance for Trust in Media. And it is no secret that the journalistic profession is facing a huge decline in trust, a very confronting thing that for any profession to have to face. And just to pluck one of many statistics out of the air that we could have.
there was a Gallup at night foundation research that found that for the first time in 40 years, people with no trust at all in mainstream media now exceed those who have even a little trust. Now, at the same time, the trust in mainstream media has collapsed, the creator economy has grown exponentially. So it’s not as if people have…
…withdrawn entirely from the information ecosystem, they’ve just shifted to a new kind of delivery system for their news. This is kind of the focus of your report for the Shorenstein Center. Let’s just, if you wouldn’t mind, just ground us in the quantifying this shift. Just kind of tell us about the growth of the content creators and
and had that contrast with the state of traditional media.
Julia Angwin (02:07.462)
Yeah, I mean, like I got really fascinated with this creator economy, mostly through my kids, which I think a lot of people have had that experience. My teenage children, both, if they want to find out something, like they have a question about the world, they go to YouTube and they put the query in YouTube. Like they don’t even do Google, which to me is just mind boggling. And so to them…
…YouTube is like a source of truth that is something, you know, like TikTok is sort of like fun and YouTube is like to them, all the news that’s fit to print is YouTube. And so I really got into this thing. think a lot of other people did, which was like, what are they seeing in this? Right. Because I’ve spent my whole life trying to create content and informative content, content that serves the public.
And obviously people are voting with their eyeballs that they want something else. And so when I started looking into it, I saw the numbers are incredibly stark, right? I mean, there are, you know, the creator economy is on a tear. It’s, think, you know, multiple times the size of journalism. And I think the size of the journalism economy is probably overstated because all the numbers are like a year old and every day another entity collapses. So.
So I think it’s very clear that where the audience wants to be. The audience wants to see people’s faces and get information from people who they feel like they have some sort of relationship with. And so the paper I wrote was really trying to understand what was that? What was it that people were seeking and why did they feel like they got it there?
Eric Schurenberg (03:39.117)
Mm-hmm.
Eric Schurenberg (03:57.038)
Just to look at the causes of the decline of trust in media, there are some obvious ones that we in the profession like to point to that we’re being denigrated by powerful people and it does not help that the president of the most powerful nation on earth considers us an enemy to people and…
…The business model has eroded because of technology, but as you point out in your paper, some of the wounds are self-inflicted, or at least it is not correct, and certainly not very positive to say that all of these effects are due to sources beyond our control. There is the ability to reverse it to some extent.
Julia Angwin (04:46.288)
Yeah, I think that, you I don’t want to minimize the threats to journalism at all. Right. Like I believe that there’s a concerted effort to undermine trust in our work by people who do who find it inconvenient to have face accountability. I think that there’s also been, you know, just a total looting of our ad revenues through technology and the mediation…
…there and the lack of regulation of those industries. But I see this a little bit like, I mean, not to be too grandiose about it, but I do see this a little bit like Gandhi, right? Gandhi was facing British oppression, which was absolutely brutal, right? But he also said to lead a movement, to lead a revolution, we need to look within. And so he started to focus on things like, let’s make our own clothes and let’s collect our own salt. And like, those things were a part of that movement.
that redefining of who we are as Indians. And I think any sort of change in the world, you can’t only fight externally. I think you do have to look within about what is it about your own thing that you could change. And so for me, this exercise is about recognizing that we face powerful actors who want to destroy us and yet also saying we could do better. And what could we do better? What could we learn to do better without being punitive about it, right?
Like don’t want to sit here and beat up on the media. I’m a member of all the traditional establishments, you know what I mean? Like worked at the Wall Street Journal for 14 years, worked at New York Times right now. Like, you know, I’m part of this industry and we, as a whole, still do really important work, right? But we need to learn how to move forward.
Eric Schurenberg (06:38.348)
On the question of trust, why don’t we start there as you do in the paper with defining the components of it. You cite one of the many academic papers about the components of trust. In this particular paper, quite convincingly, you cite three pillars of trust. What are they?
Julia Angwin (07:04.222)
Yeah. So I think one thing that’s really important to think about when you think about trust is trust is not universal. Like I don’t trust my husband with everything. I trust him to pay the mortgage. I trust him to take care of her kids. I trust him to do all sorts of things, but I cannot trust that man to pick up his socks. You know what I mean? Like that is just, so trust is always contingent on the setting, right? So that the
Trust framework that I look at talks about like, what are those components, right? So the things that you need for trust is you need two people and a thing. And the two, the things that you need to assess are benevolence. Is my husband interested in being benevolent towards me? Yes, absolutely. Ability, does he have the ability to pick up his socks? I would say the evidence suggests no.
not in his skill set. And the third is integrity. And integrity, think, is actually one of the most important pieces of this, which is, are there consequences for trust betrayal? Right? One reason you trust someone is you know that there’ll be some consequence for them if they take your trust and misabuse it. And so…
…Integrity is a word for that kind of like policing mechanism, which can take all sorts of forms, right? Could be just me yelling at my husband about picking up his socks. It could be whatever, but it could be getting arrested. could be, you know, self-censorship, whatever, all sorts of things. So those are the three components where we make decisions about trust. Does the person we’re trying to trust have the ability to deliver on the thing they’re promising?
Are they in good faith actually wanting to deliver that thing to me? And what are the consequences for them if they don’t?
Eric Schurenberg (09:00.15)
Mm-hmm, okay. Well, let’s talk about just kind of reversing the order in which you first laid these out and talk about the perceived ability. Now, I would come into this, like you, I’m a member of the industry and have been in this profession for decades. And I come into this thinking that on this question, mainstream media, traditional trained journalists have…
…a huge advantage over content creators. We have the resources and the training to deliver on what we say we’re going to deliver. We have fact checkers, we have editors, and yet it is the content creators who are, have a tailwind right now of trust from their audiences. So what are the content creators get right when it comes to this question of perceived ability?
Julia Angwin (09:56.616)
Well, one thing they get right is they specialize. know, when you go to YouTube and you watch a woodworking channel, that guy’s just doing woodworking. And so a lot of creators stick to an area where they have expertise and can demonstrate expertise. And journalism has a real bias towards generality, right? The experience I’ve had in most newsrooms has been that the idea is if you’re a good reporter, you can cover anything.
Julia Angwin (10:25.828)
And that has been, I think, necessarily really as respectful as it should be of expertise, right? I’m a technology reporter. I’ve written about technology and corporate technology for most of my career. I mean, sure, you could put me in Syria and I’d try to do a job, you know what I mean? But like the reality is everyone would be better served if I just stayed writing about technology. But newsrooms don’t have that general approach, right? They really don’t…
…promote or take into account often the expertise of a journalist. And in fact, journalists are encouraged to ignore their own expertise, right? Even if you know something, I’m sure you’ve had this experience as a journalist, you still have to call some expert and get them to say the thing that you just want to say yourself. Because you’ve been covering for 20 years, you know the actual thing. And that sort of thing where we don’t…
Eric Schurenberg (11:13.678)
Yes, that’s right.
Julia Angwin (11:21.564)
really treat expertise or showcase it, I think actually does make the audience question our expertise. We do have this expertise in what you call, what you described as like the editing, the reporting skills, and that’s like a meta layer, right? But that’s not something that the audience sees. They’re really in it for that content. Like, are you an expert on the thing you’re trying to tell me facts about? And I think we’ve all had the experience of reading about a topic, some news article about something we know a lot about and seeing some pretty dumb mistakes and.
And I think that can really destroy trust.
Eric Schurenberg (11:53.506)
Yes, that’s right. And also, as you noted, the expertise of a content creator is quite visible. And the journalist tries to disguise it behind the sort of neutral voice from nowhere. Yes.
Julia Angwin (12:08.366)
Experts say, critics say. Those are the tells for the poor journalists who try to get their expertise in.
Eric Schurenberg (12:17.068)
Yes. You know, one question that I have, the example you gave was a woodworking YouTube content creator. In your paper, you cite someone whose expertise is in examining purses, leather handbags. It seems like a great idea if that is your only mission in life, but it seems also kind of hard to make a living at a niche like that. Are these content creators?
Julia Angwin (12:32.498)
Yes.
Eric Schurenberg (12:46.656)
making a living off of doing woodworking videos or purse exams.
Julia Angwin (12:50.556)
Yes, they absolutely are. You know, it’s interesting, the purse guy, he’s a leather worker. He, I think came from Turkey as an immigrant and wanted to, had been a leather worker, wanted to start again and really was trying to figure out, how do I get an audience for my purses? Like, you know, he’s competing with like Prada and Coach and you know what I mean? He’s just, and so what he started doing was…
…using his expertise to examine bags, essentially becoming a handbag critic, right? So he cuts them open on video. It’s fascinating to watch. He pours like some acetone on it and scrapes away the coating to tell you what kind of leather is underneath. He looks at the seams and you get to see all of his expertise. And many people who watch it, you know, don’t give him any money, but…
He has a studio. He doesn’t promote it that much, but he actually has a purse, you know, handbag website. And plenty of people are persuaded that he understands quality and they go to that site and buy his handbags. Cause they’re, you know, one, one hundredth of the price of a designer handbag. And, you know, from what I can see from him, it looks like he really understands quality. And so it’s actually quite good marketing for his work. And it’s also, I would say,
Eric Schurenberg (14:14.86)
Mm-hmm.
Julia Angwin (14:17.936)
incredibly informative, right? Like I’m a woman who’s read a lot of fashion critiques. There are fashion critics out there. I have never really read one that talks about the level of the seams, right? But that’s actually what we need to know.
Eric Schurenberg (14:31.79)
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Yeah, uh-huh. Well, you know, I’m also someone who retreats to YouTube to find out how to, God, among other things, how to replace the taillights on my car. And that channel is, that platform is incredibly useful for that kind of thing. Which brings us to a point about service journalism, which we should not forget at the…
Julia Angwin (14:47.773)
Yes.
Eric Schurenberg (15:00.31)
at the end of this conversation. But let’s move on to the next pillar, which is integrity, which as you noted in your example of your husband and the socks on the bedroom floor, there needs to be some kind of accountability or at least perception of accountability between the audience and the creator or journalist.
Again, here, how is traditional journalism falling short and content creators delivering on this promise?
Julia Angwin (15:33.278)
So this is, think, where traditional journalism really has fallen the most short. Because it’s really hard to get accountability, right? Whether it’s a journalist parroting the lies they’ve been told about weapons of mass destruction that led us into unjustified war, or it is just a simple mistake.
Eric Schurenberg (15:57.87)
Mm.
Julia Angwin (16:03.122)
You know, right now, for instance, you know, the New York Times is in a huge defamation case against about with Sarah Palin and they’ve already, I think, settled. they were their sticking point is they refuse to apologize. Right. And, know, if you watch a YouTube channel, a TikTok channel from a well-known creator, they apologize all the time. They’re constantly doing videos like, you know what? In my last video, I said X, it was wrong. I’m really sorry. Like, and that…
…is because they have a closer relationship with their audiences. many creators I talk to spend, they see part of their job as interacting in the comments of their piece. Journalists really don’t. A lot of news orcs don’t really have comments anymore on their site. They may or may not interact with comments on social media platforms. And if they do, probably not in a particularly authentic way, they’re certainly not given license to apologize, know, that would have to go through an editor and get to a level of whether it’s a correction and this and that.
And so we’ve gotten rid of public editors. think there’s, I don’t know if there’s any left, you know, so all these sort of ombudsman accountability mechanisms have been slowly dialed back for all sorts of legitimate reasons. Honestly, newsrooms financially struggling, all these things are expensive, but it’s also just not part of the ethos. It’s not part of the culture.
Eric Schurenberg (17:26.499)
Mm-hmm.
Julia Angwin (17:29.178)
of newsrooms and the reality is this newsroom culture is very insular and not focused on accountability to their audience. are focused often on accountability to their sources. They need to have those sources come back to them for the next story and the next story. And so that is a real peril of traditional journalism.
Eric Schurenberg (17:40.462)
Mmm.
Eric Schurenberg (17:54.314)
Yes, captured by the sources. You know, I had come into this part of the discussion thinking about experiences that I know you and I both share of seeing people reprimanded or fired for plagiarism or for making stuff up. Those cases where that has happened are quite public in our profession, probably not so much on the outside.
And what you’ve just said comes as a bit of a surprise to me. And I think about lack of accountability as being one of the problems with content creation. And I think about political bloggers, for example, who do not suffer for making up stories, say, about Pizzagate. And in fact, only seem to grow in impact the more bizarre and lurid their fabulations are. But maybe that’s not really a representative slice of the entire content creation universe.
Julia Angwin (19:05.574)
I mean, I think that’s an interesting question, right? Because the people who did that and made up those things, I think they call themselves journalists. Like, I mean, I think you and I would like to make a distinction between our work and theirs. the reality is that journalism, as you know, has no professional requirements. Anyone can call themselves a journalist.
Eric Schurenberg (19:15.598)
Hmm.
Julia Angwin (19:33.254)
And so people do abuse the term. And I think one of the challenges we have is that we haven’t professionalized and set up standards and kicked out people who are bad actors. so, so I would sort of say, I’m not sure whose ledger that harm goes on, whether it’s ours or theirs. And I, but you’re not wrong. There’s tons of creators who, who are not following any ethical standards and are just, you know,
Eric Schurenberg (19:43.032)
Mm-hmm.
Julia Angwin (20:01.574)
A lot of them are in the entertainment business more than any sort of accountability business. But what’s interesting about the world of creators is that like, if you mess up, somebody will call you out. There are a lot of like, you may not respond to it, but there is a real culture of accountability, pure accountability in that area where like some classic example is some creator will do a video and promoting a product and other creators will jump in and say,
Eric Schurenberg (20:05.742)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Julia Angwin (20:31.858)
that was sponsored and they should have disclosed it. And they’ll go back and forth and the creator will say, no, actually I just liked that product, it wasn’t sponsored. And they’ll go back and forth and there’ll be debates and other videos will weigh in about whether or not it was sponsored, et cetera. And like that is a healthy ecosystem, right? It can be toxic, there are weird fights that break out, et cetera. But journalism has none of that, right? Like we don’t peer criticize each other at all.
And we don’t have any other accountability mechanisms. you know, you basically, you can like write a letter to the editor that might get published and that’s about it. Right. And you can call a reporter. They’re not going to call you back. so I just think that like, I’m not saying it’s perfect on the creator side, but I think the culture is much more designed around it.
Eric Schurenberg (21:06.146)
Mm-hmm.
Eric Schurenberg (21:18.766)
That is interesting and that is a revelation to me. I really had focused on, there were guardrails anywhere in the information ecosystem, it was in traditional media because of the newsrooms and journalistic standards that you and I were brought up with.
Julia Angwin (21:39.58)
We do have all these mechanisms of integrity. I do wanna say that, and I talk about this in the paper, but they’re internal to our institutions and they are not at all visible to the outside, right? And so it’s true. I’ve seen people get fired for plagiarism, et cetera, but I don’t think that anyone outside of our business knows about those things or the level of rigor of editing or like the accountability, you know, for making mistakes. And so,
Eric Schurenberg (21:47.662)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Julia Angwin (22:08.422)
Those things exist, but we don’t advertise them to our audience. They’re not in any kind of conversation with our audience. Right? And so then it just feels like it’s sort of a priesthood that polices itself and then conveys its information and sort of like trust us, you know? And I think the answer to that question, trust us, is like, they don’t trust us. I think we have to, we basically have to say, okay, that didn’t really work.
Eric Schurenberg (22:15.374)
Mm-hmm.
Eric Schurenberg (22:31.574)
Yes, that’s right. And while those enforcement mechanisms are internally known to us in the industry, but not outside, the mistakes we make in that regard, the occasional claim by a departing editor like James Bennett or Yuri Berliner about prejudice inside the newsroom, those go viral.
Julia Angwin (22:56.958)
Absolutely. And it’s because it’s the only insight anyone has. Right. And so it feels like, it’s a tell all that the secrets behind the the curtain and and the reality is like, there’s so many good actors, but there’s no advertisement for them. And also, let’s be clear, there is a wide range of journalism out there. And there are definitely outlets that are not doing all this. Right. So it’s extremely variable.
Eric Schurenberg (23:00.514)
Mm-hmm.
Eric Schurenberg (23:28.642)
Let’s talk about benevolence, which is the third pillar. Again, I just refer you to that, that the question I’ve asked about all the pillars is what are traditional newsrooms getting wrong and content creators getting right?
Julia Angwin (23:41.522)
Well, in benevolence, right, the idea is you need to demonstrate that you are acting in good faith and sort of on behalf of the other person, that you don’t just have your own self-interest at heart. And I think in traditional mainstream journalism, that often takes the form of service journalism, which is, you know, I think under, it was sort of popularized as quote, news you can use, right, that under USA Today and…
Julia Angwin (24:10.992)
…And every newsroom I’ve ever been in basically considers that like a ghetto, right? That’s like, you know, the lesser prestigious jobs, the people who do it don’t get really a lot of like, there’s no awards in that scenario. There’s not a lot of accolades from the leadership. Mostly you just want to get out of it into a real prestigious beat. and also it isn’t necessarily really generated by the readers. Like it’s news you can use based on what we think you can use, but it’s not often in conversation with the audience about what they want to know, right?
What are the information that they want? That’s changed over the years. You know, this new era of engagement reporting is really about communicating with the audience, seeking their input on things. There are new outlets like Documented where they really want to answer the questions of their audience. And so there is a growing movement, but it’s still small. It’s still not a big part of mainstream journalism. And I think if you look at creators, a lot of them just say all the time to their audience, what should I cover next? What do want me to do? What are some good story ideas? They really see themselves as service to their audiences in a way that journalists don’t, honestly.
Eric Schurenberg (25:26.178)
Hmm, hmm. That is interesting. I can reflect on my own career. The organization I grew up with, you know, from decades ago, Money Magazine, was very much a service publication. And in the hierarchy of that family of magazines, Time, Inc., it was considered far inferior and less prestigious than the business news rival of Fortune.
There was, and you alluded to this earlier with content creators, there was an element of trust being partly created by delivering the information that the users wanted with a slant that the users might want. So an example from those days was that…
…Money recognized in the 2007 era that housing prices were out of control and that the whole market was balanced kind of on a pinhead and warned people to not invest anymore in real estate, that it was not going to continue to grow to the sky. Our readers were furious and refused to believe it. They had quite a bit of their…
…intellectual property and identity tied up in investing in housing. You could sort of see the same thing in in I think content creators who probably particularly on the political side to bring up those that that side of the information ecosystem again, feel like they cannot deliver news that challenges their readers identity or…
…delivers news that they find unwelcome. Audience capture, I guess, is a risk across all kinds of journalistic enterprises, content creators or traditional.
Julia Angwin (27:33.776)
Yeah, absolutely. And I think if you look at the creator economy, right, it is very much incredibly, not small niches, but, you know, really segmented, right? Like I serve this particular community of people who want to like talk about model trains, you know, and and that does mean…
…that you have a closer interaction with your audience, they are more involved. And maybe you can’t write or say bad things about model trains, right? Cause like your people are gonna be mad at you. But I think that a big part of the whole trust framework is about understanding that. It’s actually not about the fact that there is any sort of like,
Eric Schurenberg (28:12.93)
Right.
Julia Angwin (28:29.668)
It’s more about the authenticity of like, know where you stand on this, not that you are always getting like the, you know, God’s truth from on high. It’s actually like, I know that you are always going to deliver me model train information that I know is going to be useful and helpful. And also I know that if I want model train accountability work, I have to go somewhere else. Right? Like, and that…
…is actually what people are looking for in trust relationships, right? Is like, where are the lines? What can I trust you with? What can I not trust you with? Right? And I think part of journalism’s challenge is, right, a lot of it was built in this mass media trying to serve everybody. And so it tries to cover a huge swath of things. And then you do kind of lose that connection and you lose the ability to say, I’m really the expert on all these things. And so
And weirdly, a lot of journalism is still trying to be all that mass when it’s actually the whole media landscape has become very fragmented, right? So I think you could make an argument that like a lot of newsrooms should probably put people who are like more experts into beats than generalists, right? Given the competition that they face from real experts out there.
One of the conflicts is that an awful lot of the revenue for content creators comes from product placement and endorsements and everything. And you talked earlier about the sort of comment section and sort of the user feedback that holds content creators to account for that but it still seems like a built in conflict of interest in the content creation business model.
Julia Angwin (30:28.818)
Yeah, I mean, I think that the good content creators disclose and certainly the FTC has rules requiring disclosure, although I don’t know how much they’re enforced. The community does try to police it. think more than anything else, I see content creators being accused by others of hiding sponsorships.
That’s the most common sort of critique I see flying around. So I do think there’s an effort in the community to police it. I don’t know. I think obviously the best money you can get is subscription money, aligns you with your audience and everybody knows where you get it. But, know, advertiser money also skews things. Certainly, I coming from…
a decade or more in nonprofits, donors are always trying to skew coverage. So there’s always going to be pressures. think really the most trustworthy thing to me is honest and transparent about
Eric Schurenberg (31:39.496)
Let’s talk about some of the solutions for traditional newsrooms that you derived from the work you did. A lot of, and I might sort of introduce some of the things that I’ve come across at the Alliance for Trust that newsrooms that we work with are trying to do to rebuild trust. And I wonder how they align with your research.
A number of the newsrooms that we’re working with are aiming to deliver news on vertical video. So over the TikTok platform, as long as it remains in existence in the US or Instagram or traditionally formatted video for YouTube. How does that initiative align with
Julia Angwin (32:19.986)
Yeah, we have a few more days now.
Eric Schurenberg (32:36.947)
of what your research shows might be a path forward for rebuilding trust.
Julia Angwin (32:42.11)
Well, I think it’s interesting. think a lot of people are seeing the growth in the creator economy and thinking that it has to do primarily with the format, that it’s video. And I think that is true to some extent, but I think if you do video without doing any of the other things, that the creator community has norms, right? And those norms involve engaging with your audience, listening to them, responding to them, often taking their story ideas seriously…
…executing on them, I’m not sure that you can get all the benefits just by producing the video. I think that being part of that community means more than just producing in that format.
Eric Schurenberg (33:25.102)
And one of those other things would be that kind of interaction with the audience. And you’ve talked about how traditional newsrooms have gotten rid of their public editors or ombudsman. My belief was that without a whole lot of evidence, was that in many cases that role was eliminated in part because it didn’t seem to move the needle, did not really generate a lot of…
…incoming engagement with audiences and certainly hasn’t arrested the decline in trust. But that’s something that you mentioned as a possibility. How would that work with the traditional newsroom?
Julia Angwin (34:06.268)
I mean, I think I raise it as an option. think there are possibly ways to iterate on the model of public editor to make it a little bit less of a ivory tower. I think more than anything, I think what people want is to feel heard, right? And if it’s the public editor who can make them feel heard, that’s fine. If it’s engaging with the reporter themselves in the comments, I kind of think the idea that…
..A lot of the creators I talked to said after they post the story, they spend one to two hours engaging in the comments. I mean, honestly, that to me feels like it might do more than a public editor, right? Just like responding to people, clarifying when I said, you know, this, what I really meant was X, et cetera. There are a lot of legal reasons why newsrooms might feel leery about that. Right. And, and so I, I can understand the concerns.
Eric Schurenberg (34:45.048)
Mm-hmm.
Julia Angwin (35:03.804)
especially when you’re doing really sensitive accountability work against well-pocketed adversaries. But I also think you have to think about how you keep your audience with you. And so I guess what I’m calling for more is experimentation than a particular model. Maybe a public editor would just actually flag comments that should be responded, send them to the reporters to respond to. There could be different ways that that role exists.
Eric Schurenberg (35:34.744)
Good. What else besides changing up the platform for delivering the news, the public editor, what other things do you think could be helpful?
Julia Angwin (35:45.502)
Well, as my hobby horse of the failure of objectivity, I think is important to mention. I think objectivity was this idea we had in journalism to try to be fair, right? And it has become a weird, like, performative neutrality. And it leads to a lot of things. Like, for instance, the thing we were talking about earlier, where journalists have to hide their own expertise and try to put in weird, you know, kind of mealy-mouthed sentences that everyone can tell are mealy-mouthed. Or try to call up somebody to get a quote for something that you should be able to say directly. I think those are all artifacts of our desire for objectivity. And I think that that’s a false god. It has led us nowhere. It has alienated the audience who feels like they’re being tricked.
that there’s a false veneer of neutrality over something that’s clearly got an agenda. And I think that being more honest about where we’re coming from would make a lot of sense. that could, I think the vertical format, the conversational format of video does help with that. is, if you hear a reporter talk about their story just casually, it’s often much more understandable and interesting than the way it’s been written.
Eric Schurenberg (37:10.808)
Hmm.
Julia Angwin (37:11.926)
in that sort of vert, you know, inverted pyramid news format. And so I think there’s a way to really experiment once again, with, different ways to focus less on this neutrality and actually own our voices, right? Like, who are we? And I think that’s once again, that is a difference. Like you can’t just put vertical video on your page. You have to allow people to have their voice.
to be who they are. That’s what people respond to in this is that they are, humans are really good at assessing benevolence ability and integrity. That’s literally what we do in our snap judgments. There’s tons of books about this, right? Like we just sit around and assess each other based on like, you know, whatever, how much our eyelids blink or whatever. And so I think that you have to let people see who the reporter really is.
And judge them on the robustness of their reporting, not on the purity of their soul.
Eric Schurenberg (38:18.786)
That is a great thought. Let me close by asking you to make a forecast. On the question of trust in mainstream media or the profession of journalism, do you see a pendulum swing or will there be a continued decline in sort of organizational journalism, institutional journalism and a continued swing towards this kind of individual relationship between the the reporter and the audience.
Julia Angwin (38:53.052)
I’m coming around to this idea recently that journalism is a practice, not a profession. That we don’t have any of the markers of a profession. We don’t have a membership. We don’t have accountability. We don’t have, you know, we don’t have an exam. you know, professions are actually generally things that self-police in some way. And so I’m starting to think, and I think the
election really helped solidify this that journalism is something people practice and they don’t always do it all the time. Some of the people who interviewed the presidential candidates, I don’t think describe themselves as journalists, but they practice journalism in those moments. Right. And so I guess what I really feel strongly about is let’s try to make those practices as rigorous and robust as possible and be a little bit less concerned about who does them, right. Labeling people.
Eric Schurenberg (39:32.577)
Mm-hmm.
Julia Angwin (39:47.708)
and being more clear about what are those practices? What are the things that are just the absolute, you can’t call it journalism if you don’t do X, Y, and Z, right? To me, that feels like what we need to focus on in the future because what we really want out of journalism isn’t just like a profession and a name. We want to hold power to account and I don’t really care who does it, right? And we are in an era where that is increasingly terrifyingly urgent. And so I guess what I want is to make sure
the people have skills to do that in a way that’s bulletproof. Because as you know, as a journalist, if you go after, you know, what’s that famous line? If you go after the king, make sure you kill him. I mean, that’s how it is with power, right? You’ve got to have your facts right. And so I want to arm everybody who wants to go hold power to account with the best possible tools for making their work bulletproof. Because to me, that’s the urgent work that we all need to do.
Eric Schurenberg (40:27.829)
Mm-hmm.
Eric Schurenberg (40:46.626)
Well, let’s leave it there. That is fantastic. Julia, thanks for the work you did on this report for the Shorenstein Center. And we’ll put a link to it in the program notes. And thank you for the work you’re doing at Proof News. Thanks for taking the time to talk to us on In Reality.
Julia Angwin (41:03.324)
It was a pleasure to be in reality.
Created & produced by: Podcast Partners / Published: Jan 30 2025
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