Nov. 28, 2025: Trust Matters: A conversation about record-low levels of trust in the media

The Faith in the press is at historic lows. We discuss it at Front Range Community College with an audience of inquisitive students and a panel of journalists. What we lose when we lose faith in the media is a sense of common cause. We tend to see the worst in everybody. We're suspicious of one another. I think the news consumer has a lot of responsibility. You can't just rely on the fact that a news organization... says it's trustworthy or it says it's unbiased. I tell my students there should be a human involved before and a human involved at the end. That is kind of a bright line these days when it comes to journalistic ethics around AI and that we're not just going to let the machine take over and publish things directly online or to the web or to social media. Trust Matters Encore.

This is Colorado Matters from CPR News in KRCC. I'm Ryan Warner. Trust in the news media is at a new low. According to Gallup, less than a third of Americans, just 28% express a great deal or even fair amount of trust in newspapers, TV, and radio. In the 1970s, trust was as high as 72%. My, how the press has fallen in people's eyes, and we gotta talk about it. We're gonna do that with the help of the next generation of listeners, viewers, and readers, and maybe journalists. I've come to Front Range Community College in Westminster, where student journalists and young news consumers will meet the press and make yourselves heard. Now, I'm merely going to get the conversation rolling with our guests. Greg Moore is former editor of the Denver Post. His 14 years at the helm yielded Pulitzer after Pulitzer. His career also includes stops at the Boston Globe and the Cleveland Plain Dealer. This year, he was inducted into the National Association of Black Journalists' Hall of Fame. And Greg, welcome and congratulations. Thank you very much. It's good to be here. Corey Hutchins runs the Colorado College Journalism Institute. He's a contributor to the journalism lab at Harvard, and he keeps tabs on the local press in his weekly newsletter inside the news in Colorado. And I encourage you to subscribe. Hi, Corey. Hi, Ryan. Thanks for setting this up and hosting this. And thanks Aaron at Frontraged Community College for having us. The power of the press stems from the US Constitution's First Amendment and from a slew of federal, state, and local laws that guarantee access and transparency. And that is Jeff John Roberts domain. He leads the Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition, which bills itself as the voice for open government in Colorado. John Roberts himself practice journalism for more than two decades at the Denver Post. And howdy, Jeff? Hi, thanks for having me here. Hello, everybody. To get us started, I'd like to ask each of you, what do we lose as a state and a nation when we lose faith in the press? Greg. Well, first, I'm going to talk about the stat that Ryan used earlier about confidence in the media. One of the things we have to understand is that the media landscape has changed a lot since 1972. when we had three major networks and we didn't have CNN, we didn't have social media, so you can understand with that kind of fracture how attitudes could change and be influenced and that kind of thing. So it's not a static thing like ranking Congress, which has been the same forever, right? What we lose when we lose faith in the media is a sense of common cause. We lose our ability to really...

Pollution can increase. There's simply less oversight. I mean, talk about a direct connection. Greg Moore, I mean, this could spark dissertations, this question. How did we get here? Name a force or two. It's a really great question. Talk radio. In the 1980s, when Rush Limbaugh, and I'm not blaming Rush Limbaugh, I'm talking about a phenomenon. When Rush Limbaugh started out, liberals really controlled talk radio generally. And people didn't pay any attention to what Rush Limbaugh was doing, you know, the alternate universe of facts and things of that nature, the caustic nature of the dialogue or what have you. And as he began to get stronger and stronger in an unchallenged way, more and more conservative media broadcasters began to take over talk radio, unchallenged. in the 1980s, in the 1990s, until you got to a point where there actually was an alternative universe, an alternative universal facts. And by the time media really began to recognize what that was doing, from a societal standpoint, it was actually too late. It was just too late to stop. And of course, there have been other factors, you know, the Internet, social media. But I really traced it back to the early 1980s in the rise of conservative talk radio. So you would draw a line, say, between Rush Limbaugh and an Alex Jay Jones. I would. And again, I'm not, this is not to demonize Rush Limbaugh. I think he did what he was allowed to do. But yes, there's a through line there. And there's a whole host of radio talk show giants now. And they tend to be from the right. Talk radio is controlled by the right. And as a result, you know, I would say right-wing media is a lot more influential in this country than left-wing media, believe it or not. Although we have the New York Times. That's just a fact. But he did Limbaugh earn people's trust, didn't he? He earned their loyalty, okay, because of concerns and suspicions about liberal bias in the news. He earned their loyalty. I don't know about trust. And I think those are two different things. Corey Hutchins, what's a factor in how we got to this level of trust? Sure, so that's one. Another just could be the almost seemingly unlimited access to all sorts of information that are out there now. The proliferation of platforms. Sure, so we could go back a couple hundred years and see this when the Gutenberg Press came out and they printed the Bible and then they could read it themselves and they don't have to go to church and listen to somebody. tell them what it says. They can say, well, I can read it in here and I can interpret it for myself. And then you see distrust in religious institutions. So now we have people who can go to social media and look at all these different apps on their phone and go, I don't need the filter to tell me what I need to know. I can find it out for myself. And then you see a distrust in institutions, not just the media, but scientific institutions, higher education institutions. And so I think that's certainly a factor as well.

Jeff, what would you cite as how we got here? I mean, it's interesting because you come as a longtime reporter, now someone who is something of a watchdog for the First Amendment. Right. And all those factors that Greg and Corey mentioned are extremely important factors, but the revenue models, which Greg knows more than anybody about. Money, money, money, money. The money, the revenue models for... producing news have collapsed in a lot of ways. So when I was at the Denver Post, we had this very longstanding war, newspaper war with the Rocky Mountain News, trying to essentially put the other out of business. There was another aspect of that, which was to out-scoop the other, which was the healthier part about it. But it was a fight. to the end to see who was going to last. And so subscriptions, the ad revenue in particular, that model changed because classified ads moved to the internet. There was less spending on display ads. And so for every news type of news organization now, they are all struggling to figure out how to fund traditional journalism, whether it be a nonprofit model where people decide they value it and so they'll pay for it, or getting grants from foundations that are interested in supporting local journalism, that's successful to some extent, or whether it's a billionaire who is going to buy a newspaper and just say, let's keep this for a community. Greg Moore, just because there was so much there invoking the newspaper wars. Of course, the Denver Post survived where the Rocky didn't. What's the ideal source of funding for journalism? That's a really big question. Personally, I think the ideal source for funding journalism is the people in this room. I think that we have to pay the cost for the information that ensures our freedom. You know, the revenue model of corporate support for journalism through advertising was one model that worked. For a while. For a while. You know, philanthropy has been a model that's worked. You know, having deep pocketed tech roles running newspapers look promising for a while. And I've been, after being trained to think differently my entire career, I believe in taxpayer-supported journalism. I really do. And I don't think that the... worries that have been expressed about public support for journalism are really valid when corporations were supporting newspapers through advertising it would be foolish to think that they weren't trying to influence coverage they were trying to do it all the time You know, they were always twisting doorknobs to see whether or not they could, you know, get a story delayed, or if we could get me to write a story on President's Day about how to really negotiate for a car, they'd be like, what the hell are you doing? It's the biggest day for car sales. We're your partner. Why are you writing that story? And we're writing that story because our readers are going out to buy cars and we're trying to make sure they don't get fleece. The interests are different. They're always with tension there, right?

And so I think that we will figure out ways to create guardrails so that there's not undue influence from elected officials or people who hold taxpayer purses to influence journalism. But just like taxpayers support public campaigns, for elected officials, we should be able to have a check off on our tax returns to support, you know, journalism that's in the public interest. Jeff? Yeah, local journalism is a public good. I've come around to that as well, but of course now we've seen a lot of efforts to, and actually Congress cutting funding for the corporation for public broadcasting, which was a model that was working well. There was a firewall there that the government was not influencing what was produced on national public radio and PBS. And that... Money was very important to make sure public radio stations and outlets, PBS outlets, were surviving in the remotest part of the United States. And now it's more difficult because that's not there. So I think that there's a way to do this, as Greg said. where there is a firewall between the government and the actual news that's produced, because you absolutely do not want any influence from the government about... what decisions are made as to what is covered. Before we get to questions from the young people gathered here today, Corey Hutchins, just take a swipe at this issue. There are any number of models we've seen pop up in Colorado. So for instance, after the closure of the Rocky Mountain News, the Colorado Sun came as a membership model. Is there evidence? taxpayer-supported journalism works at the hyper-local level? I mean, I guess beyond the CPB. Maybe in other countries. I don't think we've seen an experiment yet in the United States, but I think we're on the verge of one. And part of that is because there's people up here on this stage who are willing to talk about it in a way that I don't think they would have been 20 years ago. As Greg said, like we were just trained to just have this almost mental block that says, no, no, no, the First Amendment. Government should not get involved in the press. And I think that to an extent that's certainly true, the guardrails that you both talk about are absolutely necessary. But we also have to think back around the founding of this country when we were setting up laws and government, those things helped a flourishing media. We had in the 1700s legislation that allowed people, the Postal Act, for instance, allowed people to get breaks to transmit newspapers because the philosophy was more people should have access to that information. We didn't complain that the government was helping. Right. So that was a long time ago. What can we do now? It takes actually some imagination. And I think we just didn't have that many years ago when times were good, when the advertisement dollars were flowing into the newsroom coffers and we didn't have to worry about it. Now we do. The pandemic exacerbated it. And you're sitting here and...

2025 on a journalism panel with a journalism professor or former editor and an open government advocate who usually is challenging the government on these issues. We're all up here going, yeah, let's actually try and think about this in an intelligent way. And that's new and I think exciting. I mean, it's just NPR and PBS over here going, duh. You finally came around. We are at Front Range Community College today for a forum on media literacy and trust in journalism. After a break, questions from our student audience fuel the rest of the discussion. Like what actually builds trust and how do you know whom to trust? Trust me, we'll be back with Colorado Matters from CPR News. Faith in our country's institutions is shaky. That includes faith in the press. Yet we're inundated with media. Today we take the show on the road to Front Range Community College, where students will now drive the conversation. Our panelists are Corey Hutchins of the Journalism Institute at Colorado College, Greg Moore, former editor of the Denver Post, and Jeff John Roberts of the Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition. Hi, I'm Adali Kastanita Kintero and I'm from Thornton. I wanted to ask you what strategies do you use for your audience to build and maintain trust in your work? And what are the most effective strategies? So we've talked about some erosion or a lot of erosion in trust. What is a tool to build it back up? What has worked? Greg Moore. I think what's worked in terms of rebuilding trust is sharing source documents. I think it's been really important. Not just explaining how you came to the conclusions you did as a journalist, but actually sharing the actual document so that you yourself can look at that and determine whether or not you would have come to the same conclusion, given the same access to that information. If I had to pick one thing, that would be it. I'm so grateful as a reader when there's a hyperlink, for instance, to a court decision. And it's not just that I'm trusting the words. I'm going and I'm seeing, wow, what a strange ruling. Or that phrase wasn't exaggeration. Jeff John Roberts. I think that is so important. I mean, with a paper newspaper, which I still get on my driveway every morning, you can't do that. A what now? Yeah, I still get the Denver Post on my driveway. And I like that because I can flip through it and see things. that I may not have otherwise seen on a web page or something like that. And I still find it really useful. But what Greg said with hyperlinks, things like that, that was not possible before. I think that's a really important thing. The whole idea of providing the source information or the primary sources of your information, that's what a lot of what I do at the Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition. Our job is to make sure that journalists and the public have access to the records of government. It can absolutely help you be more precise in your reporting about government, but it also helps you as a reporter rely less on what a government official says.

or maybe the government official doesn't want to talk at all. And so when you make a records request, you might be able to get closer to what actually happened in a circumstance. I think of a situation last year where the police chief of RTD, the regional transportation district, was fired. The CEO of RTD was asked about this. and she told a reporter for CBS News Colorado, that's none of your concern. That was actually in the story that the CBS reporter did. She said it's none of your concern. A records request for his termination letter, which took a long time to get, finally showed that this police chief was fired for various ethical violations, including driving an RTD police car 100 miles an hour on something like 23 occasions. So there was something there. And the public official didn't want to talk about it. So when officials don't want to talk, sometimes the records will talk. Corey Hutchins, have you seen a radical approach to rebuild trust? You have your eye on outlets across the state. Anything novel? Or is this old-fashioned? No, it's not old-fashioned. I think the news outlets who don't try and do these experiments or try and build trust with their audience are going to have a hard go of it. The Colorado Sun does something interesting. They have something called credibility indicators. On their stories, you can see a plus sign. that says this is original reporting we're not taking it from somewhere else they have a sign a plus sign that says something like on the ground meaning we were there we watched this we observed this happen they have another one that says expertise this is our reporter who has expertise in this subject whether it be the environment or public health it's not just a random reporter who's taking this on or something. And so credibility indicators or something, there are organizations like trusting news or the trust in news project that are helping these organizations with this. I totally agree with everything they said, well, bringing in something different that hasn't been talked about yet. So I've been a reporter for nonprofit news outlets. I've been a reporter for for-profit news outlets. Now I own and run my own media company inside the news in Colorado, a weekly substack newsletter, or I guess I'm part of this movement of people who have left legacy media institutions and gone out on their own. My subscriptions are going up, and I think part of that is because I'm not afraid to have a personality and not afraid to have what we in the business sometimes call an intimate relationship with our audience and walk them through things.

sometimes I am thinking about, like artificial intelligence, instead of just using it or reporting on it, I will ask my audience, how do you feel about this? So that conversation, I think, with my audience builds trust. And I think that's why we're seeing surveys that show that while trust in legacy media institutions might be dropping, people are telling pollsters that they actually trust these independent content creators that they're seeing on their phone screens because they feel like they know them. I think I hear in all of your answers a version of show your work. Don't just assume that the reader, the listener, the viewer knows, understands, and trusts show the work. At Colorado Public Radio, I'll say that we have things called trust articles. When we... devote a lot of reporting resources to a particular issue or series, we will write an inaugural article about exactly why we chose the topic, how we reported it, whom we talked to. And this is a way of bringing the audience in to the work. Can I just add one thing? Please. I think all that's really great. I do think you have to guard against naval gazing, right? All that time you're spending putting a block there explaining that could be used to do serious reporting, right? But the other thing I think that the media has done has been really, really important is to say, here's what we think we know. Here's what we don't know. And here are the questions we've asked and don't have answers to. And that's something that would never have happened 15, 20 years ago. And I think that that has done a lot to help people understand how they should think about the issue, the questions they should be asking about the issue. And when those two things match up, that's when you have something really beautiful happen that's called trust. I think that's really important. I don't know. Those three words are so powerful, Greg. And it's so hard sometimes for journalists to save them. Very. Yeah. Hello, I'm Donald Tena from Westminster, Colorado. How do we know which media to trust? So I run a project called the Colorado News Mapping Project, or a help run it in a partnership with the University of Denver. And you can go to co-labnews.co. And in the top right corner, it'll say, find my local news. And we're seeking to try and find where people are getting their local news and information in all 64 counties in Colorado. There are more than 600 sources on there. Not all of them are sources you should trust. And I'm willing to say that because we decided not to kind of be the judge and jury on what wound up in this project. The source is on our map, it's because people in the communities in that county told us that's where they're going for news and information. What you can do is look on the right side and you'll see a green dot and a green dot will tell you whether that's...

source is a member of the Colorado Press Association or the Colorado News Collaborative, so they've done some filtering there. You can also click a little drop-down and it'll give you a description of that source written in a neutral way that hopefully gives you enough information where you can say, yeah, okay, I think I should trust this, or that sounds like it might have some germs on it. Across the country, we're seeing news mapping projects. A lot of them come out of higher-ed institutions like Colorado College of D.U., where people are trying to make sense of and acknowledge that people are getting their news and information in a lot of different and non-traditional ways. And so we're trying to put that in one place where you can kind of access it and have a little bit of understanding that somebody else has looked at this and said they're willing to be a member of our press association, for instance. And that's usually a green flag. Jeff, when you go to a particular story or website, or news item, what is an indicator you look for to trust it? First of all, I think the news consumer has a lot of responsibility here. You can't just rely on the fact that a news organization says it's trustworthy or that says it's unbiased. You have to do some work yourself. So you're looking for things like what we've talked about. Are they explaining? where the information comes from. Are they using things like anonymous sources? And if they're using anonymous sources, are they explaining why they're using anonymous sources? You don't find that, for instance, very much on the local level. It happens sometimes. reporters in Washington who are covering, say, the Department of Defense right now, and they can't even be in the building, they're going to have to rely on sources, sometimes people who are anonymous to tell them what's really going on. But if they're doing that, are they having multiple sources saying the same type of thing? I really do think that a big problem right now is that people are just going to information sources that are based on their political point of view, at least for their national news, doesn't happen so much on the local level. That's contributed to our divisiveness. And if someone really wants to work at it and to break out of that, they need to diversify their sources of news. A really good place to... gain more news literacy habits, better news literacy habits, is to go to the news literacy project, which is a great website with all sorts of tools on there, videos, lessons about how to be a really good news consumer. So if you want to work at it a little bit, instead of just taking in whatever is fed to you, you can do things like that. We'll link to both. the project that Corey mentioned, the mapping project, and to the news literacy at cpr.org. Greg Moore, do you want to take on Denal's question? How do you know which media to trust? I think it's a personal journey of experience. You know, it's just like if you're watching a television station, a weather person says it's going to rain tomorrow and it's 90 degrees and sunny, eventually you stop listening to that person, right? And so I test drive information.

If I go to a site and there are no links, I immediately disregard that piece of information. I just do. Uh-huh. How about a byline? Not that important to me. I mean, when it comes to a columnist or something like Nicholas Christoph, I kind of know what to expect. But most of the people that are writing today, I don't know them. I'm not, you know, a practicing journalist's day in and day out anymore. So that's less important to me than... the source of the information and my ability to sort of actually go look at what it is that they're talking about. But if I see a source of information and it turns out that it's not reliable, they don't get a second chance with me. I never share information unless I've checked it out myself. If the more incredible a story seems to be, the more skeptical I am of it. If after an hour, I don't see it anyplace else, I think, I don't think that that's really reliable because of scoop only lasts for about a minute or two in this environment. When you see something that's not followed up on in about an hour, you know that there's a problem there. So there are just ways that you can self-test drive information and determine whether it's reliable over a period of time. And our discussion, trust matters at Front Range Community College continues in this next half hour with the forces intentionally eroding trust in the news media and the importance of getting beyond officialdom and to everyday people. I'm Ryan Warner. You're with Colorado Matters from CPR News and KRCC. Let's return to Westminster, home of Front Range Community College. Students in the Journalism Program are guiding the conversation today about media literacy and trust. Our panelists are Jeff John Roberts of the Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition. Corey Hutchins of the Journalism Institute at Colorado College. He's also a contributor to the Journalism Lab at Harvard. And Greg Moore, former editor of the Denver Post, who is the latest member of the Black Journalists Hall of Fame. Jeff, let me play defensive journal. I mean, devil's advocate. So while the press itself bears some responsibility for a decline in trust, don't we have to talk about the forces, even the policies working specifically to erode trust? There is a rather concerted effort. to label facts as fake, no? Yes. We've seen it at the highest levels of government in our country where the press has been labeled the enemy of the people. And when that is repeated over and over, a lot of people will start to believe that. We've seen journalists attacked. We had that happen in Grand Junction. Colorado. And so when there is a continuous effort to try to make journalists seem like less than trustworthy people,

That undermines the whole purpose, what journalists are trying to do, which is to just inform their communities and do it in a professional forthright way. One thing I would love to add on this, I'm sorry to be over talking, but... You're not. One of the things that Trump... I mean, you're not over talking. You may be sorry, but you're not over talking. One of the things that Trump has really been skillful in doing is not writing anything down. So like almost everything he does, whether it's, you know, ending wars or having tariff agreements or, you know, the 20-point plan for Gaza settlement, like it's not written down. And so the media kind of like is reporting this, but there is no source document, right? Like you can't say that was written down, that this is what we can point to. And so if things go south, we just look like, you know, we kind of made stuff up out of whole cloth, right? they don't really produce documents right now. It's a very interesting way to undermine the media, in my view. And I think it's effective. I really do. I think it's effective. Or you limit access to what documents are created by laying off the FOIA officers or just not responding to records requests. Or moving journalists out of the Pentagon. Or moving journalists out of the Pentagon or repeating. falsehoods again and again and again. I, in preparation for this, I looked at Politifact, which keeps track of false statements that the president makes. And so these are some recent ones. Portland is burning to the ground. Small children are given 80 different vaccines. The U.S. currently has no inflation. So those are repeated over and over and over again. Democrats paid Beyonce $11 million for an endorsement. You repeat these things over and over again, a lot of people will believe it, and will they actually go to search out those trustworthy news organizations to find out what the real information is, what's closest to the truth about all these things? That's where it takes some work on the part of the news consumer. You know, one thing, though, if I could just say we haven't talked about. And it started at the beginning of this when you asked us why we thought trust was declining in the media. And it's been an hour, and neither of us, we've all kind of let the media off the hook. It's always been something else. And I think we could acknowledge, and I'm willing to, that sometimes the media steps on its own foot. a news organization might not ought to be trusted. And we can think of some recent examples, particularly in the national media and here locally in Denver, where ownership has really caused problems for the journalists that are trying to get trust from readers in their communities. So you see a cable outlet that caves to the Trump administration on something, right? And why are we supposed to trust them now? Here in Denver,

You have journalists at the Denver Post, excellent journalists at the Denver Post, many of whom you know, Greg, who are covering the city's budget problems really well. And at the same time, their awful owner is not paying rent to the city, okay? To the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars. I read two million. Oh, well, many hundreds of thousands. An average person that isn't like super into journalism, it doesn't really understand about how important ownership is and how it's separate from the newsroom might think that the Denver Post might be harming the city of Denver and then extrapolate that to the journalists in the community trying to cover it. And so unfortunately, sometimes media companies, particularly the owners, have caused these problems themselves. And I would just add to what they both said and I agree 100%. There are little things that we do that we shouldn't do. Like we repeat falses and we'll say stuff like shorthandas, President Trump said, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, without evidence. But we repeated it, right? There's no evidence. Like generally, you shouldn't report things that you can't confirm, right? And we do it all the time. And so it perpetuates... this in a way that i don't think it's really healthy it's not it's not really workable it's not sustainable and then you turn around and you criticize trump or whoever is the purveyor of that when actually you've perpetuated it yourself so i think some self-examination is in order here as corey is saying and as jeff saying and then we should be demanding that uh as news consumers We have a question from Ashley Parker of Thornton, but Ashley, can I ask you a question first? Of course. Where do you get your news? Do you get news? I do get my news from online versions of newspapers. I prefer to do an internet search for the region I'm interested in. Okay, so it's specific to a particular storyline. It is, yes, and I have family all over the country, so I like to look into places specifically. What's your question? My question is, how do you make sure the everyday person's voice, not just officials or experts, is heard in your reporting? Can I take this because... Of course, Corey. So we bring in a New York Times reporter, Dave Phillips, into our classroom sometimes as a guest speaker. And he told the class something that he did when he was a local reporter, and he had this rule that if you have a desk and a title, you've probably already been quoted in the local news before. And so he wanted to go a couple steps removed from that and find somebody who's maybe impacted by the decision the person with the desk and the title made. And I think little things like that are something that we can do. Always looking for new voices. You know, when I was a young editor, I used to actually put together a source book, you know, in cooperation with other journalists. I would ask them, like,

come up with five different folks who've never been quoted in the newspaper, make that source book available in the newsroom, and we would update it every year, you know, to make sure that folks who don't normally have access or have the voices heard get a chance to participate. And it was effective then, and I think a version of that would be effective now. Just be more specific about that, Greg. So the source book... What? If you knew you were going to be doing a story about dentistry. Dentistry. If you're going to do a story about NASA, if you're going to do a story about budgeting, if you're going to do a story about finance. Here's a list of five or six people. Some of them are women. Some of them are people of color who generally tended to be underrepresented in news coverage, who would be willing to talk and who have expertise in the area that you're writing about. Generally, reporters tend to rely on the same sources. So you have to force them to broaden their circle for access. You have to force that. And that's how we did it. And it was very, very effective. And especially, I think, in breaking news, it's so easy to call the person you've called 10 times before. Jeff. Yeah, so many, many years ago, I started in the State House Bureau of the Denver Post. This is long before any of you were born. And I worked under an editor named Neil Westergard, a great, great editor who's no longer with us. And he had on his tape to his... word processor at the time. We didn't have PCs yet. What does it mean? It said, what does it mean? And so we were covering the state capital and we were covering all these bills and things that might take weeks or months to get past and years. But what he drilled into me and others who worked with him is what does this mean to the average person, the Coloradoan out there? So when we wrote stories about about major bills, especially if we do what they were going to pass, we tried to find people that this would impact and write those stories like that. What does it mean to people in their homes at their kitchen tables? I love the phrase, I don't know who coined it, nothing about us without us. That is, if you're covering homelessness and you only have the mayor on, Why aren't you speaking to someone who has experienced homelessness? Someone who's closer to the ground. Nothing about us without us. I'll also say because we are at Front Range Community College, the big universities, CU, CSU, to some extent UNC, have massive press departments that churn out experts. It's very easy for the press to call up D-U and see you. But there is a wealth of expertise at the community colleges and fewer communications and media resources at those institutions that mean you're not getting a barrage of press releases from them.

So I encourage journalists to look at the community colleges in their backyards for experts. The conclusion of Trust Matters when we return, a student wonders about artificial intelligence and news. This is a special edition of Colorado Matters from CPR News. They practice journalism, they support journalists, and they critique their own profession. Let's return to Trust Matters and our expert panel at Front Range Community College. Corey Hutchins leads the Journalism Institute at Colorado College. Greg Moore is former editor of the Denver Post, and Jeff John Roberts heads the Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition. A final question from our student audience. Hello, my name is Yarra Galicia and I live in Broomfield and my question is, how do you see the role of journalism involving with AI, social media, or misinformation? Can you give examples of how these are already shaping practices or audience trust? And maybe we can zoom in on AI. Corey, since you mold the minds of young people, do you want to start? Yeah, sure. Artificial intelligence is going to drastically reshape how journalists do their jobs, and it's going to drastically reshape, I think, how audiences consume news and information. We're already seeing it, and it's changing so fast that it, I think, is impossible to even try and predict what's coming in the future on this. I tell my students we had a conversation this week about AI use in journalism, and some of the things I told them is that there should be a human involved before and a human involved. at the end. That is kind of a bright line these days when it comes to journalistic ethics around AI and that we're not just going to let the machine take over and publish things directly online or to the web or to social media. But I just can't say if that's going to be the case in... a few months or a few years. I think we should all be paying attention to what's out there and what kind of technology exists. It's becoming increasingly hard for me as who I think is a really savvy news consumer and news and information consumer. I'm starting to see these videos pop up in my feed that I I automatically just think are real because I've seen something like it before and really have to stop myself and wonder if that's true or not and then jump off that and check. That's something that's just going to become more and more of a problem. For the consumer and the journalist. It's going to put pressure on journalists for sure. Yeah. And the consumer, unfortunately, as we talked about earlier, is this just being more and more incumbent upon you all to become literate news consumers. And to verify. What, is there a second source, etc.? Greg, are you grateful not to lead the Denver Post in the AI era?

I'm grateful to be out. Yeah. I'm really grateful to be out. Like I had a really great run for 40 years and it was kind of like during the golden years of journalism and you know my superpowers is working in a newsroom and I can't imagine running a virtual newsroom. So I'm happy to be out not having to watch CNN 24-7 or look at tweets. To go to your point about AI, I think we're just a scandal away. Just like you have scandals with plagiarism, there's going to be a huge scandal where somebody has forced information out on the general public that was AI and wrong. Like wrong as hell, okay? So we're just, you know, months or weeks or years away from a scandal that's going to bring down a news organization and I live in fear of that. But do we need that? I don't want it, but I think it will help, you know. Interesting. I think it will help set standards and guardrails, right? Because right now that's not happening. Now, where I think AI is really helpful, and I think it's already being employed, it's like analyzing large data sets, doing calendars for meetings and things of that nature, you know, doing sports scores and stock tables and things to that nature. I think it's been very, very helpful, but boy, I would really draw the line when it comes to, like, information delivered directly to news consumers that, as Corey would say, has been touched by actual human journalists. I think that that's a gate that really... needs to be erected and maintained at the highest level. Jeff, do you think you'll get a robot request to the Freedom of Information Line sometime? That's already, well... I don't know if I'll get requests to me, but people are already using AI to bombard governments with records requests. This happened in Pennsylvania. There's been stories about this, and so governments are now struggling with what to do when that happens. And of course, that makes it harder for everybody else who wants to get their records request responded to in a... a reasonable period of time and to not pay a lot of money for it and things like that. So it's just complicating the situation. But there are other things like we are working. So I'm also president of the board of the National Freedom of Information Coalition and we're working with a national group called Muckrock. We got a grant for this on tools to help newsrooms with records requests. And so I'm not sure exactly what that's going to look like yet. But we want to make sure that newsrooms in every state get access to the type of information that our organization offers people, maybe doing it easier, quicker, also offering legal help when they need it, but using AI for that. Thanks for being with us. Our pleasure. Thank you for being here. Thank you, everybody.

And that is Trust Matters from Colorado Matters, with special thanks to journalism educator Aaron Leff at Front Range Community College. Our audio engineers are Zan Huck Pichoni and Pete Kramer. Carl Beelick is our executive producer. I'm Ryan Warner, working to earn your trust each day at CPR News and KRC.