The new annual Gallup poll on institutional trust suggests U.S. media are regaining (albeit slightly) the ground lost.

Its poll of trust in newspapers and television found growth after years of all-time lows. Some 28% said they had a great deal or quite a lot of trust in newspapers and 27% said the same about television.

That number, though, lags considerably behind numbers as recent as 2003.

The biggest gains in approval came from 35- to 49-year-olds. Younger Americans expressed greater trust in television and less trust in newspapers. While Gallup says the new numbers are good indicators, it points to the volatility of young trust as a precursor of possible difficulties.

Newspapers and TV ranked 10th and 11th of the 16 institutions assessed.
 
 
Scott Rosenberg, the media critic and co-founder of Salon, writes in the PBS MediaShift Idea Lab that newsrooms have a credibility issue they can address. He notes that about half of all stories contain errors but only about three per cent of them are corrected.

He has some basic prescriptions to restore and redevelop trust:

1. Link out. Let people see what you've researched.
2. Show your work and let it be iterative.
3. Let people help you identify and fix mistakes.

Rosenberg says four problems beset newsrooms in grappling with their shortcomings: tools and workflows aren't up to the task, there is denial and avoidance, readers are seen as adversaries, and the business is obsessed with the business.

How do you think media can more effectively deal with errors?
 
 
A report released today suggests Canadians continue to trust traditional sources of media.

A public opinion poll found nine in 10 Canadians found mainstream media trustworthy and reliable. It also suggests only one in four found social media similarly credible.

The survey was conducted by Angus Reid Public Opinion for the Canadian Media Research Consortium, an academic organization examining journalism issues.
 
It found that about one in three young Canadians valued social media for trust and reliability and that overall Canadians were far more comfortable with professionally edited content than wiki-type refinement. Most also believed that professional media were better equipped to deal with critical issues than were citizen-based entities.

"The established news brands continue to be the gold standard for verification," the survey concluded. While younger Canadians were more optimistic about the possibilities for citizen-based media, even they registered a high degree of support for traditional sources.
 
 
The rise of social media only extends so far, so far.

A new survey in the United States reinforces the primacy of traditional media as the source of news for Americans.

Television remains the principal information medium (49%), followed by the Internet (15%), radio (13%) and newspapers (10%). Those numbers aren't radically different than other surveys in the last two years.

Television is also the first choice of follow-up stories, ahead of the Internet and newspapers. Social media is a very small prime source of news, registering only about one per cent in the survey by the First Amendment Center.
 
 

In an everyone-is-a-journalist age, we're going to need all the help we can get to assess the credibility of sources. More than likely in the collaborative age, this assessment will be increasingly crowd-sourced and not simply produced through market forces.
Which is why NewsCred is an intriguing addition to the public sphere. The Geneva-based site uses tech to permit users to vote on which sources are credible and which ones aren't, and from that it derives a rating system. In the process it provides a Digg-like ranking of top stories and blogs to consume. Nothing dissimilar to, say, a TripAdvisor or some such service. It reminds me a little of the Steven Brill ahead-of-its-time All-Star Newspaper, long since demised --- the only difference being his team assembled the paper, whereas this is generated by audience forces.
Now, naturally this system is wide open to manipulation. It's likely some people who disagree with a blog will suggest it lacks credibility, and some news sources (ahem, Fox) are likely to get all sorts of finger-waggling ratings.
But it'll be interesting to see if the overall philosophy of the service --- to find and deliver the most credible news content and blogs --- overpowers the folks who try to thwart it. In that way it's a test of the 2.0 ethos of collaboration and conversation.
If nothing else, it's a fun tool.

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