The 32 Percent Project Wants to Rebuild Relationships Between News Organizations and Readers

Two participants of the 32 Percent Project converse at a workshop in Pico Rivera, Calif. [Courtesy Photo]

Trust in the media has been declining for some time now, and in the current media climate, the issue has become a full-blown crisis for the industry.

It was shortly after the 2016 election when Gallup released a poll illustrating that only 32 percent of Americans said they had a measure of trust in the news media. That figure prompted Todd Milbourn and Lisa Heyamoto, journalists and educators at the University of Oregon School of Journalism and Communication, to travel to several different communities across the country to hear it from the people themselves. Their findings became the basis for their report, “The 32 Percent Project,” which can be found at medium.com/the-32-percent-project.

Over the course of a year, Milbourn and Heyamoto visited four cities: Pico Rivera, Calif., Boston, Mass., Vienna, Ill. and Oxford, Miss. The cities were carefully selected based on geographic, economic, racial, political and rural divides to reflect the diversity of American communities.

Evelyn Mateos, writing at Editor & Publisher, profiles the revolutionary work being done by the 32 Percent Project.