Before People Believe the News, They Believe Who Tells It
by Cierra Brown Hinton
Before people believe the news, they believe who tells it. It doesn’t matter whether that messenger is a newsroom that broke the story first or a neighbor who heard it from someone else and passed it along. People have always decided what to believe the same way: by whether they already trust the person or organization sharing it.
In an ocean of information, people navigate the way they always have: neighbor to neighbor, church member to church member, group chat to group chat. Trust is the beacon. When a community doesn’t trust the people or organizations telling it what's happening, the information doesn't land and people don’t find out what they need to know. People can only show up, push back, or take part in the decisions that affect them when they trust in the source.
I’ve coached newsrooms on how to deepen the relationships that sustain them and led an abolitionist media organization that reported with community members, not to them. In both roles, I’ve seen time and again that telling the story is not the hard part — earning the community’s trust is. So, since I became Director of the North Carolina Local News Lab Fund in July, I’ve been asking a different set of questions than the one this sector usually asks, which is “how do we restore trust in local news.” That is a fair question, but I think there are better ones:
How, where, and from whom do people find information they can trust?
What moves people from knowing information to acting on it?
How can funders recognize trusted relationships within communities as essential infrastructure, and fund it that way?
Find & Trust
How, where, and from whom do people find information they can trust?
Trusted relationships are the infrastructure North Carolina runs on when something goes wrong, and these relationships deserve to be treated like infrastructure: funded, maintained, and planned for, instead of noticed only after a disaster and forgotten by the time the next story breaks. At the North Carolina Local News Lab Fund, trust is one of the first things we look at when deciding which organizations to support and we implore our philanthropic peers, in North Carolina and beyond, to do the same.
Funding with trust at the forefront starts with knowing where it lives. These are the signals we use at the NC Local News Lab Fund to identify trusted messengers:
Does a community turn to the organization when something happens?
Does the organization answer to that same community when it gets something wrong?
Does the organization help people know what is happening to them while there is still time to act?
A newsroom like The Assembly, with its statewide network partners and community events that go deep on the issues that matter most to North Carolinians, can be that trusted messenger. So can a community organization like Refugee Community Partnership, which local government offices in Durham and Orange counties relied on during Tropical Storm Chantal to get emergency information to Arabic- and Karen-speaking families, because that trust had been built through home visits and monthly women’s groups long before the storm.
Use & Act
What moves people from knowing information to acting on it?
Getting information to people is only half the job. The same relationships that carry the news are the ones that have the power to turn what people know into what people do.
We saw this when the North Carolina Department of Transportation announced toll lanes on I-77 near two historically Black neighborhoods in Charlotte. In response, the Sarah Stevenson Tuesday Forum, the room Charlotte’s Black community has trusted for the better part of fifty years to stay informed and hold power accountable, did more than make sure people heard about it. The Forum filled a room with impacted community members, surfaced what the plan would cost and who would bear that cost, and connected residents to the meetings where the decision would be made. They did that work as a part of a broader community effort that ultimately led to the project being halted. That is what trust makes possible after the headline: it turns information into action that the community takes together.
Resource & Fortify
How do we move from restoring trust in local news to resourcing the trusted relationships communities already have?
It goes without saying that none of this work on trust matters if the news and information people receive is inaccurate. A perfectly verified story that nobody trusts is just as unhelpful as a trusted rumor that turns out to be false. In both scenarios, the information didn’t do its job of equipping people with accurate news about what’s happening and what they can do. As a sector, we focus a great deal on the second problem, combating misinformation and disinformation, and much less on the first: the high-quality, verified journalism that never reaches the people it was for.
In local news, our markets largely equate to our communities, which is why we so often treat “reach” as a measure of how well we serve them. But reach doesn’t equate to impact. Philanthropy needs to shift from thinking about how to help newsrooms reach more community members and, instead, consider who is most effective at reaching people in the community. This allows us to focus on directing more support to the folks who are already best positioned to serve their communities through news and information.
Progress Doesn’t Happen Alone
Holding an expansive view of the types of organizations that count in our ecosystem also creates the opportunity for funders who have never called themselves “local news funders” to realize that this is their work too. I’m grateful that the Fund can act on that opportunity with the support of a national effort to bring more philanthropic partners into this work as the home of Press Forward North Carolina and Press Forward Charlotte. Just as our field partners cannot and should not do this work alone, we must also do this work in coalition and partnership.
As I continue to think about how philanthropy can best rise to the occasion, I keep coming back to this grounding idea: Before people believe the news, they believe who tells it. That was true long before I got here, and it’ll be true long after. My job is to work alongside partners and peers to make sure the North Carolina news and information ecosystem keeps getting stronger at building and deepening trust, on purpose. As a resource mobilizer, community organizer, systems thinker, former publisher, forever coach, and most importantly, a North Carolinian whose family has been in this state for more than eight generations, I’m deeply honored to do this work. I look forward to what we’ll be able to accomplish together.
