Lynn Walsh
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rebelmouse.com,
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Wisconsin State Journal,
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and
Covers:
Government, FOIA transparency & access, Legal, Tech in media, Ethics, Digital Innovation, First Amendment, Education, Military, Journalism, Audience Engagement, Religion, Travel, Health & Fitness
Doesn't Cover:
Entertainment
Emmy-winning journalist • Digital Explorer • FOIA fighter • @TrustingNews • @SPJ_Tweets • @PLNU • #Sunsets #1stAmendment
Articles by Lynn Walsh
AI isn’t a journalist: What newsrooms can do about it to build trust and engagement with their communities
AI is getting better at summarizing information, scraping news content, and repackaging information for communities. I recently led a conversation with The Lenfest News Philanthropy Network exploring two questions I continue to think about as I consider AI’s impact and influence on the information ecosystem: 1. What if AI’s limitations are actually an opportunity for newsrooms to build trust and grow revenue? 2. What if AI is making the human work behind original reporting more important, not less?
Opinion: Think journalism is inaccurate, biased or sensational? Tell us how to improve
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready... By Lynn Walsh, Society of Professional Journalists It’s no wonder a lot of Americans hear the phrase “media ethics” and think it sounds like a contradiction. According to a recent Gallup poll, fewer than 1 in 3 American adults (28%) say they have a “great deal” or “fair amount” of trust in news organizations to report the news fully, fairly and accurately.
Why young people need AI literacy — and how the news can help
This is a guest post by Lynn Walsh, assistant director at Trusting News, a nonprofit organization that helps journalists build trust with their communities. Artificial intelligence seems to be everywhere — in our social media feeds, Google search results, advertisements and more. But with so much AI-created content flooding our screens, how can we tell what’s real and what’s not?
Creators—and everyone sharing on the internet—should think about minimizing harm - News Creator Corps
It starts out simple enough: someone posts on Nextdoor asking why the sirens are going off or why their water pressure just dropped. Others chime in with what they’ve seen, and before long, speculation and rumors start spreading. On Instagram, local meme accounts, once known for funny posts, now share videos showing a house fire, a bar fight and arrest, a plane making an emergency landing on the beach. They post the videos with no context, letting commenters fill in the blanks.
AI Trust Kit helps newsrooms win back skeptical readers - Editor and Publisher
Posted Thursday, October 30, 2025 12:00 am We might need to disclose things now that will become so standard and sort of best practices that we won’t need to disclose them in the future. As people learn more about this and are confused by it or skeptical of it, their expectations and needs for disclosure might change as well.
Meet the newsrooms selected to join Trusting News AI literacy efforts
Teams from 15 newsrooms will invest in educating their communities about AI. Trusting News is excited to share the newsrooms selected to participate in our efforts to help journalists educate the public about artificial intelligence. Our research shows both that people want to be educated about AI and that they would welcome that education from journalists.
Engage with your audience before, during and after you use AI
The latest research suggests listening and engagement are even more critical to building trust in journalists’ use of AI than we first learned. We’re excited to share we have new research about how audiences are responding to AI use in news. The findings from our new research have led to the development of new resources to help you build trust with your use of AI.
Newsrooms: Apply to join two new paid Trusting News initiatives focused on educating the public about AI
Trusting News is recruiting newsrooms for two research-backed opportunities to educate the public about AI Our research shows that people want to be educated about AI and that they would welcome that education from journalists. Is your team ready to help your community better understand artificial intelligence and build trust in your journalism while you do it? Trusting News is currently accepting applications for newsrooms to do just that. Thanks to support from the Patrick J.
Deadline extended: Join our next AI cohort (includes $2,000 stipend)
Building on the success of our first AI newsroom cohort, this second cohort will test in-story disclosure language directly with audiences. We’re thrilled to share an exciting opportunity to participate in Trusting News’ latest initiative, focused on transparency around AI use in journalism. Supported by a grant from the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation, this program will explore how in-story disclosures about the use of AI can foster trust with audiences.
Focusing on what people actually need
In 2025, journalism is going to get a much-needed reality check. Instead of sticking to old habits and assuming people will adapt to how we deliver news, we’ll finally start designing content that fits into real lives — short attention spans and busy schedules. The focus will shift to meeting people where they are, offering news that’s not just informative but genuinely useful, relatable, and easy to engage with.
Apply to join Trusting News’ paid newsroom cohort on AI transparency
We’re looking for newsrooms who want to lead the way in transparent AI practices. Participating newsrooms will each receive a $2,000 stipend. Trusting News is excited to announce a new opportunity for newsrooms to participate in our research and experimentation focused on transparency around AI use in journalism. This initiative, made possible by a grant from the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation, will explore how in-story disclosures about AI can foster trust with audiences. Apply here by Jan. 10, 2025.
New research: Journalists should disclose their use of AI. Here’s how.
New data collected by a recent newsroom cohort, hosted by Trusting News and Online News Association, shows a majority of news consumers want journalists to disclose how and why they used AI in their journalism. Note: Assistance with the survey data cited in this story came from Dr. Benjamin Toff at The University of Minnesota and was analyzed by Suhwoo Ahn, a postdoctoral research associate at The University of Minnesota.
Meet the 11 newsrooms working to understand audience’s perceptions of AI use in news - Editor and Publisher
Posted Monday, July 22, 2024 9:22 am Eleven news organizations are joining a cohort assembled by Trusting News to explore audience perceptions of newsrooms’ use of artificial intelligence. The project is part of ONA’s AI in Journalism Initiative, which delivers essential resources for journalists and newsroom leaders to understand the emerging tech trends they should focus on now.
Meet the 11 newsrooms working to understand audience’s perceptions of AI use in news – Online News Association
Eleven news organizations are joining a cohort assembled by Trusting News to explore audience perceptions of newsrooms’ use of Artificial Intelligence. The project is part of ONA’s AI in Journalism Initiative, which delivers essential resources for journalists and newsroom leaders to understand the emerging tech trends they should focus on now.
AI in Journalism Initiative Archives – Online News Association
The Online News Association (ONA) will expand the AI in Journalism Initiative, the industry’s go-to resource driving newsrooms’ understanding and adoption of AI tools, thanks to $250,000 in new support … Read more. The Online News Association (ONA) is excited to partner with the Joyce Foundation to provide essential training on artificial intelligence for journalists and news executives in 25 local newsrooms in … Read more.
Replicate The NYT’s new staff bios with this guide
The New York Times is getting industry attention after announcing the rollout of their new staff bio pages, which they call “enhanced bios.” The accolades they are receiving are rightfully deserved: These bios do a great job of highlighting both the ethics and expertise of their journalists, as well as show the humanity and mission behind their […] The New York Times is getting industry attention after announcing the rollout of their new staff bio pages, which they call “enhanced bios.” The...
As your newsroom continues covering the upcoming elections — and political/government coverage more broadly — get on the record about your goals by creating an election mission statement & FAQ Page
This weekly Trust Tips newsletter shares quick, actionable tips for how journalists can earn and sustain trust. Subscribe to get it in your inbox at trustingnews.org/newsletter. At Trusting News, we know newsrooms take time to strategize their election coverage, often meeting months in advance. These discussions focus on what races to prioritize and the overarching ethical considerations guiding reporting.
¿Cómo decidir a qué historias agregarle elementos de transparencia?
Ser honestos sobre el proceso periodístico fortalece la relación entre la audiencia y los medios, entonces ¿cómo decidir cuándo y cómo incorporar la transparencia en tus historias? Aquí te damos algunos consejos clave. Sabemos, gracias a la evidencia, que cuando una sala de redacción brinda explicaciones sobre su proceso de reportería, puede ayudar a que la audiencia comprenda mejor los objetivos y motivaciones del medio, y a que en general mejore su percepción de las organizaciones de noticias.
Learn how to decide which news stories to add transparency elements to using these tips from Trusting News
This weekly Trust Tips newsletter shares quick, actionable tips for how journalists can earn and sustain trust. Subscribe to get it in your inbox at trustingnews.org/newsletter. Hi there. Lynn here. We know, thanks to research, that when newsrooms provide explanations and insight into the reporting process it can help people better understand your goals and motivations while also improving perceptions of your news organization.
S.J.V.A. v. Villa et al
Plaintiff: S.J.V.A. Defendant: Carlos Villa, Lori Hensel, Melissa Nofziger and State of Oregon Case Number: 3:2023cv01483 Filed: October 10, 2023 Court: US District Court for the District of Oregon Presiding Judge: Karin J Immergut Nature of Suit: Prisoner: Civil Rights Cause of Action: 42 U.S.C. ยง 1983 Prisoner Civil Rights Jury Demanded By: Plaintiff RSS Track this Docket This docket was last retrieved on October 11, 2023. A more recent docket listing may be available from PACER.
Improving climate coverage for trust and understanding
Bamboo paper towels drying on a drying rack in my house. Eliminating single-use paper towels and napkins is one climate-friendly switch I have made. As important as climate efforts are to my lifestyle, I know my friends and family experience it differently. This is one reason I want to help journalists improve climate coverage for trust and understanding. Climate change is one of the most pressing issues of our time, impacting communities and ecosystems worldwide.
You Shouldn't Write 3 Articles a Week on Medium
Or even one a week. Even the idea of setting up fast-paced, high output writing goals should be tossed out the window, along with the kitchen sink. Why? Well, let me back up. It's happened again. Another summer break has past this teacher by, and her dreams of writing more Medium articles just never materialized. It's not from lack of desire or planning. I had the best of intentions - as all writers do.
Access to Information Can Help Combat the Threat to Democracy
Solutions While this might sound like a doomsday scenario for democracy, credible information, and justice, there are things we all can do to prevent society from sinking into a world overwhelmed with misinformation and disinformation. Journalists are already trying to tackle the spread of misinformation and disinformation by bringing attention to it and setting the record straight.
Today's trust tip: Create a brand for your coverage of race and culture - Editor and Publisher
Posted Wednesday, July 19, 2023 11:12 am Lynn Walsh | Trusting News If your newsroom is committed to deep coverage of race and culture, how do you make sure your audience knows that? And how do you help them find it? ABC10 Sacramento, a Tegna station, has implemented several initiatives to ensure transparency, accountability and inclusivity in its reporting.
How one TV newsroom is committing to inclusive reporting
Discussing diversity issues and working to produce news coverage that more accurately reflects and depicts what is happening in your community can be a daunting task. While this work isn't easy, at Trusting News, we believe it's essential if you want to build trust with your community, engage with them and keep them informed through your stories.
Engage to build trust: Who are the journalists?
Trust is often based on how well we know or understand someone. It’s true in personal relationships, and it’s also true for news brands or individual journalists. That’s why it’s important for journalists to share who they are with their community. When people don’t know who journalists are and what they do, they make assumptions and most of the time, those assumptions are negative. Instead of having them assume, tell your community who you are, what has shaped you and what experience you have.
Addicted to Your Phone? Here's How CottageCore Can Help
Whenever I want to escape my hectic life filled with too-many emails, long working hours, and endless YouTube videos, I inevitably turn to comfort reads. The CottageCore aesthetic movement made popular some of my favorite childhood stories: Anne of Green Gables, Little Women, Kiki's Delivery Service, and any Beatrix Potter book.
How I Reclaimed My Life and Found My Voice After Years in a Self-Sacrificing Religion
If you're like me, you grew up as the quiet perfectionist child. You to get straight A's (even if the long study nights nearly killed your love of learning), you to agree with everyone (so as not to cause any stress-filled drama), and you had to people-please (because everyone needs to like you...right?).
See how newsrooms talk publicly about improving diversity in their coverage
Talking publicly about diversity issues can be challenging. But, as with anything journalists do, actions and intentions (especially good ones) are likely to go unnoticed by news consumers. If you don't tell your community that you are working toward a goal, that you have ethics, that you care about getting right or, in this case, that you want to increase diversity and more effectively cover the whole community, they won't know that. You have to tell them.
Opinion: Overwhelmed by the news? Here's how you can create a healthier news diet.
Walsh is assistant director of Trusting News, a research and training project empowering journalists to demonstrate credibility and earn trust, an adjunct professor at Point Loma Nazarene University, a former national president of the Society of Professional Journalists and an Emmy-award-winning journalist. She lives in San Diego. A 2022 survey of 46 markets on six continents found that one of the leading reasons news consumers avoid news coverage is because they don’t think it can be trusted.
Journalists from around the world are creating products to create transparency and build trust with...
Through the Leap innovation training program, The International Center for Journalists and Trusting News challenged journalists to answer this question: What can we build to increase trust in journalism now - and ensure misinformation and polarization do not find a foothold in future spaces? After 10 weeks of working together, almost 40 journalists from Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, the Middle East and North America have designed, prototyped and developed some answers to that question.
Build trust by being real, right, objective and part of your community
When it comes to trust, local news organizations have been the bright spot for the journalism community as years of research and polling continue to show people trust in local news content more than national. For many people working in local news, that trend brings comfort, hope and sometimes makes the issue of building trust seem not that urgent.
Florida DOT to blame
A state transportation department is to blame for a man losing his leg after a car crashed into a guardrail that was incorrectly installed, according to a new lawsuit filed in Florida. In October 2010, Charles Pike was a passenger in a Ford truck traveling along a state highway in a rural county west of Orlando. According to the lawsuit, an animal ran out into the roadway, causing the driver to swerve off the road. Losing control, the truck left the roadway, and crashed straight into a guardrail.
ET-Plus guardrail not as safe as others
A new study shows a popular guardrail model lining roadways across the country and one at the center of a possible billion-dollar whistleblower lawsuit is more likely to produce severe injury than it’s earlier model. According to the study, the ET-Plus guardrail end terminal, manufactured by Trinity Industries, is 1.36 times more likely to produce a severe injury and 2.86 times more likely to produce death than an older model manufactured by Trinity, the ET-2000.
Connect with Trusting News at RTDNA, ONA and iMEdD Journalism Forum
The Trusting News staff is excited to be training and leading conversations with journalists in person again! We cannot do the work we do without the help of journalists. So whether it means saying hello to some of our longtime partners, meeting people IRL for the first time or being introduced to new potential partners, we are ready for it all. Below is a list of where you can find us IN PERSON over the next couple of months.
Define and share your mission for covering the election
This post will continue to be updated with new examples. Does your audience know about your goals for election coverage? Or, like so much of journalism's internal deliberations, is your purpose invisible to outsiders? At Trusting News we find a lot of newsrooms have a strategy for covering an election. Often, newsrooms hold meetings months in advance to plan out their coverage.
How journalism students are using audio boxes to explain their reporting process
At Trusting News, one of the key strategies we help newsrooms with is explaining their reporting process to their community. We do this because we know it can improve a user's perception of the news organization. Explaining the reporting process can take many forms, and we often experiment with newsrooms to see what formats work best for an explainer. The format that works best can depend on the newsroom and the community they are serving.
A Trust and Transparency Innovation training program from ICFJ and Trusting News
The International Center for Journalists and Trusting News are accepting applications for a new training program focused on buildingtrust and transparency in media to better engage and serve communities and provide a beacon of reliable information. The goal of the training program is to provide a guided, focused experience to ease the risk and cost that inhibits innovation in the newsroom while finding answers to this question: People can apply as part of a newsroom team or as individuals.
RJI Product Fellow Samantha Walker joins Trusting News
Trusting News is excited to welcome Samantha Walker to the team this summer! Originally from Joplin, Mo., Walker is currently entering her third year at the University of Missouri, where she is working toward a journalism degree with a focus in broadcasting. She has received multiple awards and honors for her work in journalism, including the Hise Green- RW Baker Optimist Awards: TV Production Student of the Year and the Missouri Broadcasters Association scholarship.
Saved in America Again Promotes Itself with False Ties to Another Organization
Anti-trafficking group Saved in America and its founder are using the branding of a national organization dedicated to locating missing and exploited children without permission to raise money for their challenged claims of rescuing young people from the streets.
How a newsroom used videos to revamp its "About Us" page and get on the record about its ethics and...
The Red Line Project, an online news organization by students at the University of Illinois Chicago and their advisor Mike Reilley, is providing transparency about its mission, ethics and reporting process on its recently revamped "Our Principles" page. The page is equivalent to an "About Us" page, something most newsrooms have. The question is: are those pages effective?
Trusting News partnering with Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in Central Asia
A screenshot of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s website showing where their news services are located. We’re excited today to announce a new partnership with Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. The partnership will focus on creating a cohort for five Central Asian news services within RFE/RL with the goal of helping the journalists better share and explain who they are and what their news values are to their communities.
Six newsrooms joining Trusting News’ Newsroom Partner Program
Trusting News is welcoming six newsrooms into our Newsroom Partner Program. The program represents the highest level of support we provide newsrooms.
Make corrections a building block of trust with our step-by-step guide
As journalists, we care deeply about being accurate in our reporting and getting the facts right. We strive for this daily by fact-checking and having an editing process in which multiple people review a story, line by line. Sometimes stories even receive reviews by a legal or standards team. Despite all of this work, we still sometimes get it wrong. That could mean a grammatical error or misspelled word, or it could mean something more serious.
How a large global newsroom is building trust using video, surveys, Facebook and more
Still image from a video produced by Siberia.Realii It may sound simple enough: Tell your audience who you are and what you value. But for some reason, journalists and newsrooms find themselves either struggling to put those explanations into words or burying them somewhere on their website where few people find them. Two newsrooms of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (a large, international news organization) wanted to change this.
Wanted: Newsrooms committed to building trust with their community
Apply for the Trusting News Newsroom Partner Program Is your newsroom ready to really invest in building trust with your community? Are you ready to embed trust-building strategies in your coverage? Are you ready and willing to create public-facing content that explains your news values, ethics and decision-making processes? If you answered yes to the questions above, we encourage you to apply for the Trusting News Newsroom Partner Program.
How one investigative news team explained their goals, mission and reporting process
We know from user research that news consumers value depth. We also know that people say they want to see evidence of fair reporting and thoughtful decision-making. That means that if you produce investigative journalism, your goal with every story is most likely aligned with what news consumers say they want. But do they recognize it? If you don't explain how you dig deeper and fact check, people will not automatically give you credit for doing this work.
Build trust with your photos and videos
When journalists tell stories through visuals, there are a lot of options for where to turn. There are also a variety of ways to capture a photo, edit a video, and share visual content. The bottom line: A lot of decisions are made by journalists and newsrooms related to the types of visual content they publish. A lot of those decisions are related to newsroom policies or ethical journalism standards that most journalists have been adhering to for decades.
People don't assume journalists have ethics. Here's how you can highlight yours.
Screenshot of SPJ's Ethics Central which includes tips from Trusting News on how to explain journalism ethics. Do journalists have solid ethics? It's a question that, depending on who you ask, will probably result in very different answers.
Here's what people with low trust in news learned attending a morning TV news meeting
At Trusting News we know audiences notice what stories get covered by news organizations and pay particularly close attention to the stories that don't get covered. As journalists, we know a lot of the decisions we make around story selection happen intuitively. We have conventions we follow about what's newsworthy and what's not. We have big-picture fairness we're trying to achieve when it comes to who and what gets attention. We know what stories we did last year and try not to repeat them.
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