The Trust Project

The Trust Project is an international consortium of news organizations collaborating to use transparency to build a more trustworthy and trusted press. Led by award-winning journalist Sally Lehrman, it is based at Santa Clara University’s Markkula Center for Applied Ethics. Search engines and social media platforms, which have become important news distributors, are participating as well. We apply a user-centered design process. Based on dozens of in-depth interviews with a diverse spectrum of public voices, news executives involved in the Trust Project identified and designed a system of “Trust Indicators,” or disclosures about the news outlet, producer, and commitments behind a story, to make it easy for the public to choose quality news. Digital platforms, such as Google, Facebook and Bing, will be able to use machine-readable signals from the Trust Indicators to surface quality news to their users. We are an open source project, which means that the materials produced by our collaboration are available to all legitimate news companies that agree to abide by the group’s commitments and Trust Protocol.