The Creator Trust Paradox

Trust in news just hit the lowest number ever recorded. 37% globally, 25% in the United States. The worst since the Reuters Institute started tracking it in 2015.

Every headline about this data says the same thing: trust in news is collapsing.

Every headline is wrong.

Buried in the same report is the number that tells the real story. For the first time, social and video platforms (54%) have passed news organizations' own websites and apps (51%) as the way people get news. And about 27% of people worldwide now get news from individual creators every single week.

Trust isn't dying. It's moving. And this year, Reuters caught it mid-migration.

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Ask the general population about news creators, and they'll tell you what you'd expect. Creators are less trustworthy than traditional outlets, by 11 points. Less impartial too, by 14. That's the average view across all 48 markets.

Now ask the people who actually get their news from creators. That's about a quarter of the world at this point. The answer flips completely. Creator users score them higher than mainstream media on every one of the eight attributes Reuters asked about. Easier to understand (+45). More relatable (+34). More authentic (+29). And sit with this one: 20 points more trustworthy. Even on impartiality, the value media institutions consider their birthright, creators come out 6 points ahead with the people who actually watch them.

The people who don't watch creators assume they can't be trusted. The people who do watch them trust them more than they trust us.

That's not an opinion gap. That's an experience gap. The only people still holding onto the old hierarchy, institutions on top and individuals below, are the people who haven't sampled the alternative. In France, Reuters found that 18-24s rate news creators as more authentic, more knowledgeable, and more trustworthy than mainstream media. And it's not a European quirk. Pew found last fall that Americans under 30 now trust information from social media (50%) about as much as information from national news organizations (51%).

One honest caveat, because this newsletter doesn't do cheerleading. The tiny slice of people who get all their news from creators, about 3% in the US, skews heavily partisan. That's not a trust story, that's an echo chamber story. The paradox is strongest among the vast majority who use creators alongside traditional news. They've sampled both. They're grading both. And that's exactly why their verdict should worry you.

Regular readers will remember Jack Brewster of Newsreel telling me he was shocked to discover that the legacy mastheads on his resume didn't just fail to convey trust with young audiences. They worked against him. Back in March, that was one founder's observation. Now it's a dataset spanning 48 countries.

The logo used to be the trust signal. For a growing share of the audience, it's now a warning label.

Before we get to why creators are winning, let's be honest about why institutions are losing. The record low isn't one problem. It's four stacked on top of each other.

The platforms themselves. More people now encounter news on social media (trusted at just 22%), and through AI answers (20%), than on news sites they chose to visit. When your journalism reaches people stripped of context, sandwiched between AI slop and outrage bait, the distribution environment drags your credibility down with it.

Political attacks. Cumulative, deliberate attacks on journalism, loudest here in the U.S., where trust has cratered to 25%. Add a broader collapse of faith in every representative institution. News is falling with governments, parties, and churches, not instead of them.

The infinite stream. The evening newscast and the morning paper were finite. What replaced them never ends, never resolves, and makes legitimate reporting hard to tell from fabrication at scroll speed. 62% of people globally say they're worried about what's real. Younger audiences increasingly protect their mental health by simply opting out.

Coverage that feels out of touch. On immigration, climate, and conflicts, audiences say the coverage serves an agenda, not them. Whether that perception is fair matters less than the fact that it's now the default assumption.

Notice what's not on that list: accuracy. Audiences didn't run a fact-check audit and find institutions wanting. They ran a relationship audit.

Judy Schramm, who has rebuilt the LinkedIn presence of more than 2,500 executives as CEO of ProResource, gave me the cleanest one-line explanation of the whole migration: "People trust institutions of all kinds less than they ever have. And so what that has meant is that people are turning to human connection."

That's the mechanism. The creators who are winning trust aren't winning it with better facts. They're winning it with three things institutions trained themselves out of.

They show you who's making it. It's what Fernando Hurtado was telling us back in January with his "farm-to-table content" framing. You know exactly whose hands touched the story and why. Reuters just confirmed the mechanism: audiences filter for a sense of personal connection and authentic personality, and a news brand can't give them either. Nobody has a relationship with a wordmark.

They show you the process, not just the verdict. "You don't have to pretend you know everything there is to know about a story," Fernando told me. "Show me and take me along for the process." Reuters found Next-Gen audiences filter for exactly this.

Transparency of intention, meaning you know the producer's motives and biases up front, beats performed neutrality.

They talk with people, not at them. Brewster's research found Gen Z exhausted by what he calls "voice of God" journalism. My daughter said the same thing without a research budget: "I don't want somebody in a tie telling me what to think."

None of this is a lower standard. Beth Conter-Johnson, who has spent more than a decade working with news managers and newsrooms on workflow and talent development at Top News Talent, told me the creators did something legacy newsrooms talked about for decades and never finished: "They figured out beats. They've modernized covering a beat and becoming an expert in a topic." And the young audience holds them to it: "They see through when you're just doing smoke and mirrors with minimal information. You're a journalist. You're supposed to be able to explain this to me better than I can explain it to myself."

Trust, it turns out, was never the product. "Trust is a byproduct," Brewster says, "of how hard you work to fit content, styles, and worldview into people's lives in a palatable way."

Here's the part of the paradox that should give every news executive hope instead of heartburn.

Trust didn't leave the ecosystem. It left the logo. And Fernando told me something that should be pinned to every news director's monitor: "The trust eventually does trickle up to the brand as well. If you're a reporter for a local station, I would start trusting the entire news organization and your colleagues there (if I trust you)."

Trust flows from the individual to the institution now. Not the other way around. Your logo can't earn it anymore. Your people can, and when they do, some of it comes home to the brand.

You've seen this play out in this newsletter already. Steve Staeger built a face-to-camera relationship with an audience on TikTok, and a rural community that had written off "the media" started routing its problems to him before any assignment desk could find them. They came away thinking “that guy from 9NEWS helped us out.” The Houston Chronicle borrowed a creator's earned trust to reach an audience its own masthead couldn't touch. Same mechanism, both directions.

The creators didn't steal the audience's trust. They just showed up in person to collect what the institutions were leaving on the table. As Fernando put it: "I don't think you can put the toothpaste back in the tube with these creators and influencers, and clearly they're resonating with audiences."

If you're a journalist: the paradox is your job security, not your threat. The trust premium now attaches to visible, transparent individuals, and you already have the verification skills the creators had to teach themselves. Put your face on your work. Show the process, including the boring parts. The audience rating creators "more trustworthy" is rating the behavior, and the behavior is learnable.

If you run a newsroom: stop reading the 25% trust figure as a verdict on journalism and start reading it as a verdict on faceless distribution. The experience gap is the whole game. Nobody who hasn't sampled person-first news trusts it, and nearly everybody who has does. Your move is to make sure the first person-first news your market samples comes from one of your people. Invest in individual talent like the franchise it is.

If you're an executive outside of news: this isn't a media story. It's a preview. The same audit is coming for your category. Institutional trust is repricing everywhere, and the premium is moving to visible humans. The trust your brand earned over decades doesn't transfer to the next generation automatically. Somebody at your company has to go collect it, in person.

The obituary for trust in news is going to keep getting written every year the topline number drops. Don't believe it. Trust is alive. It just changed its address. It's living with whoever's willing to be a person in public.

Who's collecting yours?

Hit reply and tell me. I read every one.

P.S. A meta-moment I couldn't resist. This Reuters report quotes Beehiiv CEO Tyler Denk, whose platform this newsletter is built on, predicting that "the creator use case and the enterprise use case are going to merge quicker than most people expect." The report's own example of that blur: Bari Weiss's The Free Press selling to CBS for an estimated $150 million. The line between alternative and established media isn't blurring someday. It has a price tag now.