Trust Indicators

Trust was translated into interface labels, metadata, and platform-readable signals.

The Trust Project makes a very specific Mission Years move: it treats credibility as design. Its Trust Indicators were meant to surface authorship, expertise, funding, corrections, methods, sourcing, and mission directly inside the news experience. Trust becomes an interface layer.

This is the opposite of the twentieth-century assumption that a masthead quietly carried authority. By 2017, credibility had to be labeled, structured, and in some cases made legible to platforms. The reader needed to see why a story deserved attention before the story could do its work.

That makes the project useful for the exhibit. It shows journalism trying to rebuild authority in the same digital space that had dissolved it: on screens, in metadata, in search results, and in the small cues around the article rather than only in the article itself.

Sources: thetrustproject.org ↗