From the unbanked to the unnewsed: Just doing good journalism won’t be enough to bring back reader trust

[Commentary] One lesson I learned early on in news is that what journalists value and what their audiences value are often frustratingly misaligned. We see high-quality news outlets and low-quality ones and wonder why anyone would choose the latter over the former. But the decisions of customers aren’t driven solely by perceptions of “quality”; they’re also derived from more prosaic factors like customer service, cost, feelings of community and personal connection, and a sense that both sides of the transaction have similar interests at heart.

In an environment where trust is no longer the default — where reading your local daily in the morning and watching a news broadcast at night have moved from standard to niche behavior — doing great journalistic work isn’t enough.