Abstract
By analysing the entire informational process, this project aims to identify the mechanisms underlying the exchange between trust and authority on one hand, and knowledge and meaning on the other, within today’s journalism ecosystem. The strength and innovativeness of the TASKs project lie in its approach: by juxtaposing citizens’ and end-users’ perspectives with journalists’ narratives and textual outputs, it becomes possible to understand whether (dis)trust and conferred authority stem from (un)shared professional values, from appreciated or criticized production practices—or from both. The core objective is to investigate what “feels like news and journalism to users” (Broersma 2019), and to map how and where the boundaries of journalism are stretched and challenged (Carlson and Lewis 2015). The project moves beyond traditional views of journalism as a static institution, incorporating platform-dependent channels that are also actively involved in the dynamics of trust, authority, meaning, and knowledge (see Poell, Nieborg, and Duffy 2020). The expected outcome is to provide valuable insights into the relationships between citizens and journalism (and, more broadly, news content creators) within a platformized news ecosystem—particularly in terms of media trust and journalistic autonomy. The findings will be of relevance to citizens, media professionals, and policy makers alike.
Results achieved
: The TASKs project (Trust, Authority, Sense and Knowledge) has been successfully completed, achieving all its planned objectives and advancing knowledge on media trust and journalistic authority in contemporary platformized information environments. TASKs investigated how trust, credibility, and authority are constructed and negotiated among journalists, digital content creators, audiences, and online platforms. To address these issues, the project adopted an innovative multi-method research design integrating the analysis of news production, news content, and news consumption. On the production side, the project conducted extensive qualitative research with journalists working in legacy news organizations and with platform-based news creators. The findings highlighted how professional and non-professional actors increasingly build legitimacy through relational and interactive practices rather than relying exclusively on institutional authority. On the consumption side, the project explored citizens’ news habits, expectations toward journalism, and perceptions of trust through in-depth interviews and large-scale surveys and experiments administered to representative samples of the Italian population. The results showed that trust is strongly influenced by the relationship between citizens’ expectations of journalism and their evaluations of its performance. One of the project’s main scientific contributions in this sense was the development and validation of the concept of external news efficacy, defined as citizens’ perception that news organizations are willing and able to listen to, recognize, and respond to their audiences. The findings demonstrated that perceived responsiveness and audience recognition play a crucial role in shaping trust, highlighting the relational nature of trust beyond traditional indicators of credibility and institutional reputation. On the content side, TASKs developed an original digital research infrastructure based on artificial intelligence and semantic modelling techniques. This enabled the large-scale collection and analysis of news content, user comments, and engagement data across different categories of media actors. The resulting dataset made it possible to compare communicative practices, audience engagement patterns, sentiment dynamics, and forms of polarization within digital information ecosystems. The integration of evidence from production, content, and audience research represented a major achievement of the project. The findings show that trust and authority increasingly operate as relational and processual phenomena shaped by interactions among media actors, audiences, and platforms. Emerging platform-dependent actors play an increasingly important role in influencing perceptions of trustworthy information, particularly among younger audiences. The project also provided important insights into the role of artificial intelligence in journalism. While awareness of AI-related opportunities and risks is widespread, the research suggests that factors such as transparency, responsiveness, and professional conduct remain more influential than AI adoption in shaping perceptions of credibility. All planned deliverables were successfully completed. Overall, TASKs has substantially advanced knowledge on the evolving relationship between journalism, audiences, and digital platforms, providing robust empirical evidence on the role of audience recognition and external news efficacy in contemporary trust-building processes. The project was funded by the European Union under the PRIN 2022 programme.Dettagli del progetto
Responsabile scientifico: Augusto Valeriani
Strutture Unibo coinvolte:
Dipartimento di Scienze Politiche e Sociali
Coordinatore:
Università degli Studi di MILANO(Italy)
Contributo totale Unibo: Euro (EUR) 63.921,00
Durata del progetto in mesi: 24
Data di inizio
15/10/2023
Data di fine:
28/02/2026
