These narratives articulate tensions around appropriate norms and practices, and challenges to the profession’s claims to authority. Second, they discussed platforms as altering the contexts in which journalistic texts and broader discourses about journalism circulate, weakening the profession’s authority and legitimacy as an institution deserving of trust. First, they described platforms as disruptive to journalistic work, both in terms of news content and relationships with audiences, in ways that strained traditional norms on which they believed trust was based. They considered platforms to be consequential for (dis)trust on two different levels. We find consistent evidence in all four environments that journalists espouse mainly critical narratives about platforms and their impact on audience trust in news, even as they continue to invest often considerable time and effort in reaching online audiences via platforms. We conducted interviews across four countries in the Global North (United Kingdom and United States) and Global South (Brazil and India) to bring a comparative perspective to these questions. Our work extends decades of research on journalists’ assumptions about important parts of their work-e.g., about what news is (Gans 2004 Tuchman 1978) or what their audience is like (Nelson 2021 Christin 2020)-which argue that these assumptions are important to understand both in and of themselves as social facts, and because they are among the factors that influence how journalists do their jobs. In this study, we draw on in-depth interviews with 85 senior editors, journalists, and other news workers to analyze metajournalistic discourse (Carlson 2016) about how platforms matter for trust in a news media environment increasingly shaped by platforms such as Facebook, Google, Twitter, and their smaller competitors. While some prominent critics have claimed platforms are responsible for having “eroded the integrity of content by undermining its provenance,” in the words of News Corp’s chief executive, Robert Thomson (News Corp, 2017), we know relatively little about how most journalists, editors, and other practitioners think about these challenges, especially in different countries where platforms perform a variety of functions. As discourses connecting journalistic practice and meaning, these narratives speak to tensions within journalism as a profession around appropriate norms and practices, and challenges to the profession’s claims to authority.Īs growing numbers of people access news online via search engines, social media, and messaging applications, there has been increasing concern about the impact of digital platforms on trust in news, which has been declining in many countries around the world (Fletcher 2020). Despite these reservations, most continue relying on platforms to reach audiences, highlighting the complex choices they must make in an increasingly platform-dominated media environment. Second, they discuss platforms as altering the contexts in which journalistic texts and discourses about journalism circulate, weakening the profession’s authority.
First, they describ platforms as disruptive to journalistic practices in ways that strain traditional norms on which trust is based. We find that practitioners across all environments express mostly critical ideas about platforms vis-à-vis trust on two different levels. In this paper, we draw on 85 interviews with news workers from four countries in both the Global North and South to examine journalists’ narratives-as metajournalistic discourse-about how platforms impact trust in news. However, less is known about how journalists themselves perceive this relationship, which matters for understanding how they use these technologies. The growing prominence of platforms in news consumption has raised scholarly concerns about potential impacts on trust in news, which has declined in many countries.
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