Australian industry body the Digital Publishers Alliance (DPA) released its first-ever report last week, shedding some new light on the conversation around trust in the media.
I’ve previously shared some thoughts about declining trust in the media, believing that more work must be done to engage audiences before trying to win their trust.
The DPA’s new survey of more than 1,300 audience members from 20 member outlets further underpins that belief. The survey found that independent publishers are generally perceived as more trustworthy than their mainstream media rivals.
More than three-quarters (76%) of respondents either entirely or mostly trust independent publishers.
Source: DPA
Big news outlets have always been the target of some criticism, generally from those they have sought to hold accountable. The mainstream media tends to take the most flak because it has more resources to poke about in places others would prefer they didn’t.
And yet, over the last couple of decades we’ve come to see public trust in the media fall to new lows. I’m not going to argue why that is here; we’d be here all day in that case, but I will say that the term “mainstream media” now has a certain stigma around it. It’s a loaded term that many subconsciously associate with witch hunts and “Fake News”.
Regardless of the right or wrong of it all, the reality is that many audiences harbor a distrust for more prominent news outlets, and it’s this distrust that creates new opportunities for smaller players.
The DPA survey asked its participants what they liked about digital publishers, to which a significant majority replied it was a combination of their tone and approach to content alongside their diverse and alternative narratives. Relevance, interestingly, came in third.
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While tone and approach to content will mean different things to different editors, to me, it speaks to a publication’s overall ethos around content creation. Smaller media outfits require a narrower focus to survive or they’ll be dragged in a million directions, wasting their limited resources.
For independents, this should mean focusing on passion niches, finding unexpected angles and then delivering them in a unique voice that resonates with your audience. Independent publishers that manage to do this will engage their audiences and build trust in their brand.
