Who do you trust?

News consumption habits have transformed. Why is this happening and what does this mean for folks in the persuasion business?

In a piece I wrote after last year’s Victorian State elections, I described two Australias emerging in our research. There is one Australia that is addicted to political media. You and I are clearly part of this group.

The other Australia comprises everyone else - particularly those under the age of 45. This group is operating in a completely different informational environment - one dominated by day-to-day concerns around cost of living and the housing attainability crisis, but also by algorithms and a profound degradation of trust in institutions.

There is copious quantitative and qualitative research, including our own at Redbridge, that suggests Australians are losing faith in previously authoritative sources of information.

While most participants in our qualitative research will distinguish between the ABC and the Herald Sun - with the former being more trusted - we are nevertheless witnessing a fascinating flattening of the traditional informational hierarchy. For the vast bulk of Australians not addicted to political minutiae, there is a tendency to let social networks and algorithms sort out what they need to know.

Depending on their demographic, these Australians will wait for their Instagram feeds to serve them Daily Aus pieces; their friends and family in Whatsapp, Signal, or Telegram groups to point them to items of interest; if they’re older, the Facebook algorithm to serve them content inside their favourite groups or newsfeeds; and if they’re younger, for the (much smarter) Tiktok algorithm to serve them the occasional item that has the potential to make them start asking questions.

For example, LilaRPG has 50.5k Tik Tok followers and Jordie van den Berg has 126.2K followers. Lilah is a trusted Gen Z/millennial political commentator, while Jordie shames landlords and real estate agents seeking to rent out substandard properties - again to a largely Gen Z/millennial audience. 

This is obviously not traditional news, but their followings and the referrals to their videos within social networks afford them a credibility among their audiences that older forms of news do not necessarily enjoy.

The reasons that legacy media is haemorrhaging trust alongside audience share could fill hundreds of pages. But to horribly oversimplify, young people are increasingly rejecting both the form and content of old-style news. 

Firstly, they find that so much of it is “not relevant” to their lives. What they mean is that most editorial perspectives are thoroughly divorced from their lived experience - focusing on power horse races, the interests and perspectives of the wealthy and powerful, and only offering platforms to those who already have them. They see a lot of media as a small group of people largely talking to themselves.

Then there is the fact that they find the news unspeakably “depressing” and have decided for their own mental health to actively avoid it. You might wonder how it could even be possible to adequately report the news without touching on the bleak stuff; however, new media outfits such as Crooked Media in the United States, have developed a model that shows it not only can be done but can be done very profitably as well.

Finally, there is simply that trust issue. Young people particularly see a (traditional) media landscape defined by its vested interests – billionaire owners pushing their political and social agendas, or simply the implicit bias and blindspots that come from being too much a part of a political bubble.  There are instances where specific reporting cuts through the layers of cynicism, but generally speaking the result is our media institutions simply don’t enjoy the trust and authority they once did.

In terms of how news is consumed now, news items from major outlets are now divorced from their publication’s context - that is, almost no one is actively going to news sites and reading them as though they are digital analogues of newspapers. 

Instead, news items are read by people in an entirely new context: through the validation of their social networks. People in their social networks will link to an article, thus conferring some (limited) legitimacy to the item on its own. 

And this is key: the item’s legitimacy is fast becoming less the product of the source publication and far more a product of who inside the social network has recommended it. 

Some - particularly older people - are still watching television news, but they are watching it sceptically. Television news alongside individual items on social media are now no more than informational nodes in a broader, new, socio-informational networked environment.

One of our research subjects mentioned that they do something I often do: when there is a contentious issue and they know that there will be a deluge of vested interests skewing the available information, they append ‘Reddit’ to a Google search query.

They - and I - do this, because the user experience of Google alone has also been fundamentally degraded through the proliferation of content farms and SEO practices that privilege results from organisations with money as opposed to results reflecting an objective truth. 

Reddit has a unique user base among the social media platforms: one that is generally very well-educated, young, informed, and sceptical. Reddit users are extremely adept at quickly providing the necessary framework for understanding a controversy - who the competing parties are, arguing about a particular topic. Combining that with Google Scholar and The Conversation searches is often the fastest way to understand something that is highly contested.

That is not to say that disinformation is absent from Reddit - disinformation is a problem everywhere - particularly on topics that attract grifters and bullshit artists, such as cryptocurrency. However, on more general topics, subreddits can be more self-correcting than other, comparable platforms. 

More to the point, these Reddit searches are themselves declarations of scepticism - acknowledgement that many vested interests are flooding the zone or, to mix a metaphor, creating so much noise that discerning the signal can feel overwhelming. So what Reddit offers is human (i.e. non-bot, non-SEO optimised) navigation - pointing you in the direction of potentially trustworthy information.

The meteoric rise of The Daily Aus - alongside certain news podcasts - among young people demonstrates that new ways of doing news is a necessary precondition for gaining and maintaining audience share. What these outlets have in common is understanding the central importance of leveraging the trust that social network recommendation affords them. 

Even so, I still believe there is a gap in the market for an Australian news source that understands this new informational environment - one which can deeply engage because it reflects its audience, one which can inform without depressing its audience, and one which understands the social and informational mechanics of the new, flattened landscape. The folks at Crooked have done it - proving that creating new audiences for news is possible. It is possible in Australia too, even if, at this stage, it may still not be probable.