Originally found at Forbes

Press Forward, a coalition of foundations and philanthropists, announced, two weeks ago, an initiative that would pool 500 million dollars to address the crisis of disappearing local news and information, and accelerate promising trends to reverse the decline. At this scale of funding, there is a major opportunity for a deeper conversation on two things. Impact, for, of and through local news in America on the quality of our democracy, and trust communities place in journalism.

The narrative that local news is dying and that threatens democracy may not be news to you. Press Forward has rightly called out the harm to civic participation and the civic information gaps. Of particular concern is America’s news deserts problem - many regions with no local and independent news outlets to watch the government, counter disinformation, and tell accurate stories on local realities. Given the size of the corpus, their announcement generated an expected amount of buzz, optimism, and coverage.

....Nearly thirty years ago, in 1995, a management sciences paper defined the word. Authors Mayer, Davis, and Schoorman, in their heavily cited paper in the Academy of Management Review, defined trust for organizational settings, in the context of increasing diversity, thus: “The willingness of a party to be vulnerable to the actions of another party based on the expectation that the other will perform a particular action important to the trustor, irrespective of the ability to monitor or control that other party.”