In today’s digital world, high-quality journalism can be difficult to distinguish from promotional content or even fakery. In fact, only 4 in 10 Americans trust the media’s ability to report the news fully, accurately and fairly. Audiences want to know who is producing the news, how they’re producing it, and whether it’s driven by an agenda.
With that, the Society for News Design is pleased to announce its partnership with the Trust Project to prototype ways to better signal trustworthiness in the news. We will gather March 18-19 at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism in New York City to host a fast-paced, heads down design sprint with some of the brightest minds in media.
We’ll lean on user interviews, surveys, and editor workshops conducted by the Trust Project to inform the ideation and brainstorming phases of the design process. By the end of the event, teams will have created functional prototypes to hand off for testing, iteration, and deployment by the Trust Project’s participating newsrooms.
This event marks the first in a series dubbed SNDExp (Experience). Backed by the Knight Foundation, SNDExp was created to leverage the talent of our international community to bolster storytelling and solve problems faced by NGOs, academic institutions, and under-resourced media organizations.
About the Trust Project
The Trust Project is working to restore the role of the press as a valued institution in civic life. Housed at Santa Clara University’s Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, the project is developing new methods to signal high journalistic and ethical standards to both audiences and news delivery platforms such as search engines and social media. The project collaborates with a consortium of members including the New York Times, The Washington Post, Center for Investigative Reporting, Vox.com, and others.
If you are a designer, developer, journalist, product manager, or student and would like to apply for participation, please do so by Monday, February 22. Selected applicants will be notified via email by Tuesday, March 1. A limited number of partial travel grants are available to students and professionals who can demonstrate need, however, all grant recipients are responsible for securing their own accommodations. SNDExp is free of charge.
Event organizers
Kyle Ellis is director of strategic programs of the Society for News Design, and a consultant for American City Business Journals. You can reach him at kyle@snd.org.
Tyson Evans is editor for newsroom strategy at The New York Times and secretary/treasurer of the Society for News Design. You can reach him at tysone@mac.com.
Sally Lehrman directs the Trust Project and the journalism ethics program at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics. She is an award-winning science journalist and educator who specializes in identity, race relations and gender. You can reach her at slehrman.markkula@gmail.com.
Feel free to contact the event organizers with any questions.
A special thanks to our event host:
(Times Square photo by MK Feeney, used under a CC license.)