UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — As trust in American news organizations continues to fall, this year’s Brown Democracy Medal recipient Trusting News is addressing the decline head on and working with journalists across the country to strengthen relationships with their audiences.
The organization’s executive director Joy Mayer and project manager Mollie Muchna will accept the Brown Democracy Medal from Penn State's McCourtney Institute for Democracy and present a lecture from their forthcoming book, “The Transparency Imperative: Journalism, Trust, and the Future of an Informed Democracy,” on Oct. 8 at 4 p.m. in Foster Auditorium, 102 Paterno Library at University Park.
Trusting News formed in 2016 at the University of Missouri’s Reynolds Journalism Institute and became an independent nonprofit in 2024. The organization’s mission is to “inspire and empower journalists to evolve their practices in order to actively earn trust.” It does that by providing training and educational resources to journalists and newsrooms.
The team at Trusting News works with both for-profit and nonprofit newsrooms that produce journalism online, for broadcast and in print. Its partners include WNYC, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and the Texas Tribune. Trusting News has also advised WITF, Harrisburg’s public media station. WITF established a democracy beat in 2022 to provide information about how elections work and how misinformation spreads, rather than focusing solely on horse-race politics in its election coverage.
“It is really confusing to try to consume news these days and it's rational for people to feel overwhelmed and stressed by that, They’re also not sure what is true and what is real,” Mayer said. “At Trusting News, we teach journalists to tell the story of their credibility and inject transparency into their work that explains how they make decisions and their ethical framework that is so often invisible to the public.”
The book “The Transparency Imperative: Journalism, Trust, and the Future of an Informed Democracy,” written by Mayer, Muchna and Trusting News assistant director Lynn Walsh, will be published later this year by Cornell University Press.
The Brown Democracy Medal was created by Larry and Lynne Brown to recognize new and innovative scholarship or practice in democracy. Both are Penn State alumni, and Larry is chair of the McCourtney Institute’s Board of Visitors. The award’s previous recipients include Invisible University for Ukraine, the Rendell Center for Civics and the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition.
The Brown Democracy Medal ceremony and lecture on Oct. 8 is free and open to the public. Visit the McCourtney Institute for Democracy website for more information.