For example, ensuring the understanding of staff and the trust of their audience was vital to to Gannett before rolling out AI-generated article summaries. The Gannett | USA TODAY NETWORK wanted to make sure it understood how journalists and readers felt about the feature first, Jessica E. Davis told Congress participants in Krakow.

The article summary feature already existed in USA TODAY‘s CMS, but it was underused by most journalists.

Interviews revealed that:

• Journalists felt that the summary feature was a burdensome “one more thing to do” before they could publish a story.
• Many journalists feared that if presented with a summary, audiences would not go on to read the full story.
• On the other hand, audiences said they trusted journalists’ content more than AI-generated content.

💡 Gannet developed a new AI summary feature “Key Points” that creates a summary that journalists can edit before publishing. They started by working with the travel section, with plans to roll it out more widely once it had met accuracy benchmarks.

The results were overwhelmingly positive:

➡️ Journalists embraced the tool, finding it “incredibly time-saving” compared to writing summaries from scratch.

➡️ Audience engagement increased, with readers in the travel section spending 36% more time on stories with Key Points.

Deepening engagement to build trust at France’s Mediapart

In another example, France’s mediapart.fr uses deep community engagement to build trust with its audience. Cécile Sourd outlined the various elements that allow the digital-only publisher to create a strong connection with its public.

Mediapart is a “participative media,” she noted:

• It runs “Le Club,” a platform for readers’ blogs, and has editors that select the best posts to be highlighted on the home page.
• All articles feature rich reader comments.

They also run specific participative projects, such as a crowdfunding campaign that aimed to finance a documentary about the campaign financing of former president Nicolas Sarkozy. The crowdfunding campaign was a “huge success,” and 150,000 people saw the documentary in cinemas and took part in events discussing the issue.

“We see that when you connect with people, when you make them participate in your journalism, people want to participate and even give money,” Sourd said.

Mediapart’s commitment to transparency also plays a key role in building trust:

• They publish annual financial statements.
• Stories include an infobox with background on the sourcing of the article.
• Journalists discuss their work on podcasts and in a weekly Twitch chat.

Sourd also highlighted their customer service: “We have real people answering the phone and responding to emails, which is getting quite rare. And we have people reading all the emails we get. Sometimes we launch stories based on what comes in via email.”

‘We have to use brand safety, brand trust’

Likewise resilience is a key component in maintaining trust. Bartosz Hojka from Agora SA said that resilience is the key value that drives their strategy and that resilience is “one of the most important traits for the media.”

“We have to be prepared for something that is difficult to prepare for,” especially in the context of “all these recurring crises” ranging from pandemics to war at the border, volatile tariffs, and other developments that undercut the business stability of media companies.

💡 How do they build resilience with brands? Hojka said AGORA leverages its strengths to develop its already strong brands:

“When we invest, when we make an M&A decision, we tend to invest in fields where we are already present, where we already operate, where we have experience and expertise.”

📈 They also use cross-promotion and synergies – an approach that also helps with digital ad sales, as Mariam Mammen Mathew of Manorama Online pointed out:

“We can’t compete with the platforms based on numbers. We just can’t.”

Instead, brand plays a crucial role in their ad sales strategy: “In digital advertising, you have to look at the product and discuss the product and not the numbers. We have to use brand safety, brand trust.”