Australians have a trust issue with journalists. So researchers wanted to know: would audiences be more willing to trust if news media acted more like a friend?

In May 2018, the Centre for Media Transition held four workshops in Sydney and Tamworth to ask Australians about their relationship with news media. The focus was on trust, and they wanted to ask three big questions. First, how do Australians use news media? Second, how do they trust and relate to news media? And third, how might their trust in news media be rebuilt?

As the researchers dug deeper into the relationship between news media and its audiences, they set out to test the hypothesis that users want their news media to be more peer-to-peer, less top-down. This would align with a general shift towards distributed trust, and away from institutional trust. Hence the question if users wanted their news media to be more, 'like a friend'.

They didn't. This came as a surprise. The findings suggest that what Australians want most from their news media is accuracy and objectivity, not necessarily accessibility and friendliness – the hallmarks of social media. And it constitutes just one of many valuable insights into how we might best restore trust in journalism.