News in crisis: co-creation to the rescue

Alongside the political crises engulfing the world, we are now facing a major information crisis. On 9 July at the British Academy in London, join PINF and a lineup of expert speakers – including Rhiannon Davies, Gavin Esler, Dan Hind, Lexie Kirkconnell-Kawana, Shirish Kulkarni, Fabienne Peter, Marcus Ryder and Elizabeth Seger – to discuss this crisis, and how co-creational news media could help to solve it. 

According to the Reuters Digital News Report 2025 – published this week – more than half of us are struggling to tell true from false in online news. Only about 40% of audiences worldwide trust most news most of the time – and at 35%, the UK news media has the lowest trust rating in Northern Europe.  

Gavin Esler, former Newsnight presenter, describes this phenomenon as ‘truth decay’. In his recent book, Britain is Better Than This, he explains: 

‘We are surrounded by Truth Decay and its synonyms – fake news, fake science (most recently about coronavirus and global warming), fake history (including Holocaust denial), “alternative facts”, and even the sense that what we are reading on social media is the product of fake accounts, or people with fake “followers”.’ 

In response to this crisis, the leading cross-party think tank Demos has just launched a major new project on ‘epistemic security’, through which it aims to ‘protect the UK’s information supply chain and strengthen democratic discourse for the next political era.’ Epistemic processes are those through which we receive and impart knowledge. Elizabeth Seger has been working on epistemic security for several years and is leading the project alongside Hannah Perry. 

The news media once dominated the information supply chain, but the digital disruption of the last twenty years has left the traditional media – and their audiences – reeling. At the same time, many media companies haven’t helped themselves by failing to represent or engage with huge swathes of the British public.  

In Access All Areas – the media diversity manifesto which he co-authored with Sir Lenny Henry – Marcus Ryder shows how far the British media is from truly representing the UK: 

‘If we had a level playing field, then, for every White, able-bodied heterosexual man you see on TV, in Parliament or in any position of power, you should see a woman or Black person or Asian person or disabled person or gay person. Not just once, but more than twice.’ 

If you put digital disruption together with this profound lack of representation, you start to see the scale of the problem. This is one reason why I’m sceptical about media literacy as a solution. Simply telling people to trust the traditional media, when it doesn’t reflect them and hasn’t earned their trust, isn’t enough. In fact, it could be counterproductive. We need to go much deeper into people’s lives and reflect more deeply on how we as journalists behave, before wagging our fingers disapprovingly at the public for avoiding or refusing to pay for the news. 

That’s why, at PINF, we have been working on a new approach. Rather than trying to persuade audiences to trust a form of media that holds them at arm’s length, we are exploring the emerging ‘co-creational’ model of news media, in which the public – particularly groups that have historically been excluded from or stigmatised by the news media – are actively involved. 

On 9 July, Gavin Esler, Marcus Ryder and Elizabeth Seger will be joining us to launch the Co-Creational News Media toolkit – our attempt to distil the core principles of this new approach. Working with a group of co-creational pioneers and expert advisors, we have identified sixteen elements of co-creational news media. Our toolkit is aimed at anyone who is curious about this new model, or wants to incorporate co-creational elements in their work. 

At the launch event, Gavin, Marcus and Elizabeth will set the scene by describing the democratic and information crisis as they see it. Fabienne Peter and I will then unveil the toolkit – which will live on a dedicated microsite, designed by Rhys Everquill at the Leicester Gazette (itself a co-creational outlet). And then an expert panel, including Rhiannon Davies of Greater Community Media, Dan Hind of the Media Reform Coalition, Lexie Kirkconnell-Kawana of IMPRESS and Shirish Kulkarni of Inclusive Journalism Cymru, will respond. 

You are warmly invited to join us and be part of a discussion about the future of news media that puts communities at its heart. 

Register for the event

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