TASKs. Trust, Authority, Sense and Knowledge

Head of the Unibo research Unit: Augusto Valeriani

By analysing the whole information process, this project aims to identify mechanisms underlying the exchange between trust and authority on the one hand and knowledge and sense on the other. The strength and innovativeness of TASKs is that by juxtaposing citizens’ and end-users’ perspectives with both journalists’ words and texts allows to identify whether the (dis)trust and level of authority conferred by citizens stem from (un)shared professional values or from specific modes of production that are (dis)liked, or both cases.

In addition, the objective of this project is also to study what “feels like news and journalism to users” (Broersma 2019, p. 516), grasping how and where the boundaries of journalism (Carlson and Lewis 2015) are stretched and challenged. Indeed, this project goes beyond the traditional focus on journalism as an institution, and also pays attention to platform dependent channels of information, which are also potentially involved in the exchange between trust and authority and sense and knowledge (see Poell, Nieborg and Duffy 2020). So, paraphrasing Swart and colleagues (2022), we don’t only want to talk about audience but to also talk with audience.

This project provides valuable insights to understand relationships that bind citizens and journalism by the (platformed) news information ecosystem in terms of media trust and journalistic autonomy and then understanding how news media may properly reach their TASKs.

website: https://www.tasksproject.eu

Members of the Department

Paulo Ferracioli Silva

Other members