In 2021, The New York Times launched a team of newsroom, product, and marketing staff dedicated to building trust and providing transparency for readers. The data they collected in the early stages of the project led the Times to make changes to the way its journalists interact with sources and readers, and how they present the news.
Some of these changes you may have noticed if you’re a regular Times reader, such as: enhanced bylines and datelines that explain, in plain English, what reporting took place for an article to be published; first-person bio pages where journalists share what they work on, their background, and how the Times’ ethics code applies to their specific beat; and notes that provide details on how anonymous sources were contacted and incorporated into the piece.
The goal, says Edmund Lee, who’s been a journalist for more than 30 years and works on the Times’ Trust team, is to “humanize the news operation to the reader.”
In January, the Trust team launched an “Ask Us Anything” page where readers could submit questions about how the Times was covering the second Trump administration. Hundreds of questions came flooding in, and they’ve published their answers to the most commonly asked questions here.
We caught up with Lee to learn more about how this project came together and find out how he thinks other newsrooms can replicate the Times’ work to build trust with their audiences.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
What was the thought process behind doing an “Ask Us Anything” post now?
Lee: We can’t take credit for this, but there’s a department within the Times we work closely with called Times Insider. And this group — it’s a relatively small group — but it’s designed to do exactly what we’ve been talking about in the trust principles, which is: They talk to other journalists within the newsroom about specific stories that they’ve worked on. How did they get the story? What were the mechanics and background to how certain stories were put together? It’s a way to, frankly, highlight people in the newsroom and what we do, and they’ve been doing it for a few years. So, during the election, Times Insider — and we worked with them on this — they came up with, “Hey, let’s ask readers what they want to know about how we’re covering the election.” They put out an “Ask Us Anything” on this and got tons of questions. And we worked with this group to filter out the questions and then reach out to different editors and reporters in the newsroom to answer them. That was sort of the initial inspiration for this.
This time around, with Trump coming into office, we knew there’d be even more questions not just from our own subscribers, but just from readers in general. So we said, “Let’s do that again, but let’s make it even more extensive.” We wanted to really open it up and get as deep as possible into it. The reader response was pretty astounding. We got more than 500 comments and questions in 48 hours. And we had to cut it off at that point because we were not going to be able to follow through.
Opening your inbox to receive hundreds of questions about Trump coverage sounds a bit overwhelming. How did your team divide up that work?
Lee: We started sifting through, and there are a lot of the same questions. So we had to sift through what are the most representative questions around how we’re covering Trump. And what we found is, going back to our research, there are a lot of misconceptions around how we do our jobs.
But a lot of the questions were incredibly astute. They’re asking things like, “How have things changed since the first Trump administration? Have you changed your approach to covering him based on what you learned from the first time around?” And how we cover climate: “What’s your relationship to scientists — the sourcing — how do you vet them?” And some requests are, “Is there a scorecard of all of Trump’s orders and actions that have been happening?” I mean, it’s only been a month, but he’s done a million things in a month. So there’s clearly some service aspect that they’ve been looking for.
We’ve taken representative examples of groups of them, and then we’ve gone, “Oh, this is a question for the Washington bureau. This is a question for the climate desk. This is a question that hopefully the graphics team will be able to answer.”
How does your team measure what success looks like for a project based on building trust?
Lee: A big part of what we were originally sort of focusing on was, how do we even measure trust? And we ultimately decided that any kind of measurement will always be a wonky thing. So we set upon two main things in this approach: Whatever we do, we want it to be widely distributed. What does that mean? So we changed the convention around date lines. That was a change to the entire culture of the convention so that every story, when it has a dateline, now looks like this certain thing. We have 2,000 reporters and editors — all their bio pages reflect this new thing. So in other words, these are distributed solutions. They’re not going to be cordoned off into one section of the paper or of the site. Our projects are designed to be visible to [our entire audience]. Visibility and changing the structure of the report was an important principle in terms of how we devised our projects and what we thought would be a good project.
The second is just much simpler: Is it good journalism? And almost everything that I’ve talked about is good journalism. It’s about transparency. It’s about showing our work. And I think explaining our process used to be considered bad journalism in the sense that you’re focusing on yourself. I think that is now wrong. We should be explaining our journalism. That is good journalism to do. And it’s good to encourage reader skepticism.
Is there an overarching theme to the questions you’ve received from readers?
Lee: A lot of readers recognize that there’s chaos around Trump and all the things that he’s talking about, and executive orders, and announcements. And separating the wheat from the chaff — what’s real, what’s not real — our readers are astute enough to understand that that’s the process, that that’s what we need to do. An overriding question is, “How are you doing that?”
The first time around, there were a lot of questions around, “Are you platforming him?” and “Why are you giving him all this voice?” I think a lot of us smart readers understand, that’s not what we’re trying to do. We are trying to, first of all, convey: This is the president of the United States — things that he’s saying — because that could affect all kinds of things. The words do matter. It has an effect on other governments because other governments took a lot of his words and used them in their own political efforts.
The concern that we’re just kind of parroting his words didn’t understand the broader implications. And so, frankly, it is something we contend with on an hour-to-hour basis. We’re always debating that internally — how do we position this, how much air do we give this comment, and then, of course, how do we contextualize it? So a lot of the questions still center around that, and we hope the answers that we’re providing will give more insight.
What percentage of the inquiries were just unproductive, random, or unhelpful complaints of the Times’ work? Or is all of that helpful, too?
Lee: I can’t give you percentages, because, to be honest, I don’t see everything that comes in. There is a lot, and a lot of it is just bad faith. But I will say this: A lot of them come from a genuine place of concern or upset, whatever it is. And sometimes these questions or these comments or these complaints come in all caps. And when we respond, we often find they apologize. They’ll say, “Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t realize there’s a person. I didn’t realize there’s an answer.” And sometimes there’s an actual back and forth, like, “Oh, I actually disagree with your answer, but thanks for giving me one.”
And what can newsrooms with fewer resources learn from your team’s experience with this project? Is it worth it for them to experiment with similar ideas?
Lee: I think the advice I would proffer for smaller newsrooms, and not just newspapers … you’re a magazine, you’re a blog, you’re a Substack, whatever it might be … and I think Substacks are interesting because they have a much tighter relationship with their readers, and I think they do respond directly. But you’re a local newspaper, for example. I think it’s a good thing to open up to your readers. Yes, you might get a lot of hate mail and a lot of bad faith criticism, but I think responding shows all kinds of things — that, first of all, you are a human enterprise.
And that was another thing that we found in our trust work. A lot of readers felt they couldn’t trust the media because they thought of the media as some kind of faceless, distant institution that was impenetrable — which is why they sometimes will write in all caps. I believe, I hope, that local papers aren’t always seen that way because they’re local papers. But I bet, because of the way that President Trump talks about the “media as the enemy of the people,” and we use the phrase “the media” as if it’s some kind of conglomerate. And that’s not the case at all.
But I think having several people respond to a complaint, several complaints, or an “ask me anything” only humanizes and does a good thing. It humanizes the news operation to the reader. And we found that readers will tend to give us the benefit of the doubt when they engage in that interaction. And that humanness, I think, is absolutely important to trust, especially now in the age of A.I. And how the internet itself is just this very impersonal, sometimes very nasty place. And so allowing your reporters and the newsroom to be humans and to offer human responses goes a long way, and I think it’s worth trying 100%.