The TASKs project achieved all planned objectives and deliverables, providing substantial new evidence on trust, authority, audience recognition and digital journalism in contemporary platformized information environments.
The TASKs project (Trust, Authority, Sense and Knowledge) has been successfully completed, achieving all its planned objectives and advancing knowledge on media trust and journalistic authority in contemporary platformized information environments.
TASKs investigated how trust, credibility, and authority are constructed and negotiated among journalists, digital content creators, audiences, and online platforms. To address these issues, the project adopted an innovative multi-method research design integrating the analysis of news production, news content, and news consumption.
News Production
On the production side, the project conducted extensive qualitative research with journalists working in legacy news organizations and with platform-based news creators. The findings highlighted how professional and non-professional actors increasingly build legitimacy through relational and interactive practices rather than relying exclusively on institutional authority.
The research showed that credibility and authority are increasingly established through audience engagement, responsiveness, and continuous interaction rather than solely through traditional professional status and institutional reputation.
News Consumption
On the consumption side, TASKs explored citizens' news habits, expectations toward journalism, and perceptions of trust through in-depth interviews and large-scale surveys and experiments administered to representative samples of the Italian population.
The results demonstrated that trust is strongly influenced by the relationship between citizens' expectations of journalism and their evaluations of journalistic performance.
One of the project's main scientific contributions was the development and validation of the concept of external news efficacy, defined as citizens' perception that news organizations are willing and able to listen to, recognize, and respond to their audiences.
The findings demonstrated that perceived responsiveness and audience recognition play a crucial role in shaping trust, highlighting the relational nature of trust beyond traditional indicators of credibility and institutional reputation.
News Content and Digital Research Infrastructure
TASKs developed an original digital research infrastructure based on artificial intelligence and semantic modelling techniques. This infrastructure enabled the large-scale collection and analysis of news content, user comments, and engagement data across different categories of media actors.
The resulting dataset made it possible to compare communicative practices, audience engagement patterns, sentiment dynamics, and forms of polarization within digital information ecosystems.
This infrastructure represents a significant methodological contribution and provides a valuable resource for future research on journalism, online communication, and platform-mediated public discourse.
Integrated Findings
The integration of evidence from production, content, and audience research represented a major achievement of the project. The findings show that trust and authority increasingly operate as relational and processual phenomena shaped by interactions among media actors, audiences, and platforms.
Emerging platform-dependent actors play an increasingly important role in influencing perceptions of trustworthy information, particularly among younger audiences, contributing to the transformation of contemporary information ecosystems.
Artificial Intelligence and Journalism
The project also provided important insights into the role of artificial intelligence in journalism. While awareness of AI-related opportunities and risks is widespread, the research suggests that factors such as transparency, responsiveness, and professional conduct remain more influential than AI adoption in shaping perceptions of credibility.
These findings indicate that technological innovation alone is insufficient to strengthen trust if it is not accompanied by clear editorial standards and meaningful audience engagement practices.
Key Contributions
- Development and validation of the concept of External News Efficacy.
- Extensive qualitative research with journalists and platform-based news creators.
- Large-scale surveys and experimental studies on media trust in Italy.
- Creation of an AI-supported digital infrastructure for news content analysis.
- Integrated evidence from production, content, and audience research.
- New insights into the role of platform-dependent actors and AI in journalism.
Conclusion
All planned deliverables were successfully completed. Overall, TASKs has substantially advanced knowledge on the evolving relationship between journalism, audiences, and digital platforms, providing robust empirical evidence on the role of audience recognition and external news efficacy in contemporary trust-building processes.
The project was funded by the European Union under the PRIN 2022 Programme.
