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“Trust Project” redirects here. For the charity, see Project Trust.

The Trust Project is a complex international consortium involving over 100 news organizations working towards greater transparency and accountability in the global news industry, including The Economist, The Globe and Mail, the Independent Journal Review, Mic, Italy’s La Repubblica, Il Sole 24 Ore, and La Stampa. The Project was started in 2014 by Sally Lehrman, a journalist and former director of Santa Clara University‘s journalism ethics program at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics and launched in November 2017.

Consortium members

As of 2018, the consortium includes 120 members[1] such as The Economist, The Washington Post, Germany’s Deutsche Presse-Agentur (DPA), The Globe and Mail, Hong Kong Free Press, the Independent Journal Review (IJR), Mic, Italy’s La Repubblica, La Stampa,[2][3] Bay Area News Group, CBC News, Heavy.com, Sky News, The Toronto Star, TEGNA, Voice of OC, Italy’s Corriere della Sera and Il Sole 24 Ore, Spain’s El País, Greece’s Kathimerini,[1] and Haymarket Media Group.[2]

In 2022, there were 265 news organizations that were members.[4]

In 2024, El Tiempo and El Nuevo Día completed a two-year process to become certified.[5]

Core Trust Indicators and editorial attributes

The consortium has created a standardized content management system (CMS), editorial guidelines, and style guide.[6] These reflect the consortium’s shared principles through policies on ethics, corrections, anonymous sourcing, and fact-checking standards.[1] News articles use markup language, user experience (UX) as “pieces of online code to deliver improved search and news results”[3] by providing readers with information including the author/journalist and how the story was reported.[1] The Trust Project also looks for transparency in the reporting process, including explaining some editorial decisions for major stories, being easier for readers to contact and making other disclosures.[5][7]

Background

Early Trust Project ideas dating back to 2014, included statements of mission and ethics crafted and published by news agencies, disclosure by journalists of their background regarding level of expertise and “areas of personal interest and conflict”, full disclosure of all contributors to the content of an article including researchers, editors, and lawyers, the use of citations, footnotes, and corrections with links, and disclosure of their methodology including “whom they interviewed” and “what they researched”.[8] Richard Gingras was an early leader in the creation and promotion of the project.[9][10][11]

Sally Lehrman, a journalist and former director of Santa Clara University‘s journalism ethics program at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, is the head of the Trust Project.[12][13] In his February 2018 article, Dan Peleschuk wrote that The Trust Project officially had “been two years in the making” but was, in reality, the “culmination of many more years of professional self-reflection” on the part of Lehrman.[14] Lehrman’s interest in “accountability and public transparency” was inspired in part by the 1975 Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, “when geneticists debated the potential dangers of biomedical research in an attempt to raise public awareness.”[14]

The pre-launch of the Trust Project was in April 2017 and the launch with the first group of publishers—The Economist, The Globe and Mail, the Independent Journal Review, Mic, Germany’s Deutsche Presse-Agentur (DPA), Trinity Mirror, The Washington Post, Italy’s La Repubblica, and La Stampa—took place in the November 2017.[2][1] Mic reported that their company had been working on a similar project prior to joining the consortium.[1]

Following its November 2017 launch, Facebook, Google and Twitter, also began to deploy the new trust indicator symbols to “help assure users of the reliability of their content and combat fabricated stories”.[3] As of 2024, Google, Facebook and Bing used the Trust Project to indicate reliable news on their platforms.[5]

On November 15, 2017, Twitter changed their verification methods under the Trust Project policies, and some white nationalists lost their blue checkmark.[15]

Funding

The Project has received funding from Craig Newmark Philanthropies, Google, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Democracy Fund, the Markkula Foundation and Facebook.[2][16][6] Newmark said, “As a news consumer, I want news I can trust. I want to be able to read a piece of news and know who’s behind it, where the information comes from, and the reporting values of the news organization.”[3]

Response

According to The Mirror Group‘s January to March 2018 study undertaken by Reach plc readers trust rose by 8% “after adopting Trust Project indicators”.[1][17] In his 2014 article, Jeff Jarvis said that The Trust Project represented “a start” in rebuilding trust in “journalism, news, and media.”[8] Business Wire compared the Project’s Trust Indicators to nutritional labels that consortium partners can use to “provide clarity on who and what is behind a news story so that people can easily assess whether it comes from a credible source.”[18] In the Knight Commission’s 2019 report “Crisis in Democracy: Renewing Trust in America”, the authors note that “[w]hile many news organizations have experimented with transparency initiatives, there are no standard best practices recognized across the industry.” They recommended that U.S. news media leaders and an ongoing working group of experts from across the industry could identify and adopt common standards and best practices that promote transparency” by building on “newer efforts underway such as the Trust Project” among others.[19]: 83 

See also

Notes

References

  1. ^ a b c d e f g Beard, David (October 9, 2018). “Increasing trust: The expanding Trust Project”. Poynter Institute. Archived from the original on March 23, 2019. Retrieved March 14, 2019.
  2. ^ a b c d “Facebook, Google and others join The Trust Project, an effort to increase transparency around online news”. TechCrunch. November 16, 2017. Archived from the original on November 30, 2018. Retrieved December 28, 2018.
  3. ^ a b c d Snider, Mike (November 16, 2017). “Facebook, Google, Twitter and media outlets fight hoaxes with ‘trust indicators’“. USA Today. Archived from the original on November 27, 2017. Retrieved November 27, 2017.
  4. ^ “Frenemies: reinventing the Big Tech versus journalism dynamic (RightsCon 2022): Report of the session at RightsCon 2022”. Global Forum for Media Development. 2022.
  5. ^ a b c Higuera, Silvia (July 17, 2024). “Newspapers in Colombia and Puerto Rico bet on transparency to cultivate credibility, get approval from The Trust Project”. LatAm Journalism Review by the Knight Center. Retrieved April 13, 2026.
  6. ^ a b Schmidt, Christine (April 5, 2018). “So what is that, er, Trusted News Integrity Trust Project all about? A guide to the (many, similarly named) new efforts fighting for journalism”. Nieman Lab. Archived from the original on December 10, 2025. Retrieved April 13, 2026.
  7. ^ Flueckiger, Simone (July 9, 2020). “Building trust in times of COVID-19”. WAN-IFRA (in European Spanish). Retrieved April 13, 2026.
  8. ^ a b Jarvis, Jeff (October 25, 2014). “Building Trust in News”. Whither news?. Archived from the original on July 3, 2019. Retrieved March 14, 2019.
  9. ^ Glance, David (March 15, 2015). “Trust may be important, but is it enough to rescue journalism from the Internet?”. The Conversation. Retrieved April 13, 2026.
  10. ^ Barnathan, Joyce (November 25, 2014). “Why @serial is important for journalism”. Columbia Journalism Review. Retrieved April 13, 2026.
  11. ^ Carlson, Eryn (April 14, 2017). “Flagging Fake News”. Nieman Reports. Retrieved April 13, 2026.
  12. ^ “Sally Lehrman”. Markkula Center for Applied Ethics. Archived copy from April 5, 2019 via Internet Archive. nd. Archived from the original on April 5, 2019. Retrieved July 18, 2019.
  13. ^ “Sally Lehrman”. Chief Executive, Trust Project. Archived from the original on July 18, 2019. Retrieved July 18, 2019.
  14. ^ a b Peleschuk, Dan (February 16, 2018). “On the Front Line of the Battle Against Fake News”. OZY. Archived from the original on February 20, 2018. Retrieved March 14, 2019.
  15. ^ Guynn, Jessica (November 15, 2017). “Twitter verification purge: White nationalists lose blue checkmark”. USA Today. San Francisco. Archived from the original on June 20, 2019. Retrieved March 14, 2019.
  16. ^ Fuller, Austin (March 6, 2025). “Rocky Mountain PBS, Midwest Newsroom adopt ‘Trust Indicators’ for news coverage”. Current. Retrieved May 2, 2025.
  17. ^ Tenzer, Andrew (2018), “Measuring the Impact of the Trust Project” (PDF), The Trust Project, retrieved March 14, 2019
  18. ^ “Major Effort to Increase Trust in News Achieves Widespread Adoption”. Business Wire. Santa Clara, California. October 9, 2018. Archived from the original on October 9, 2018. Retrieved March 14, 2019.
  19. ^ Crisis in Democracy: Renewing Trust in America (PDF) (Report). The Knight Commission. February 4, 2019. p. 208. Archived from the original (PDF) on March 15, 2019. Retrieved March 14, 2019.