Like much of the country in early 2020, I learned the name Dr. Marc Lipsitch from the news. He showed up across CBS, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and CNN as an expert voice on a pandemic that the rest of the information environment — especially social media — was treating with rumor and noise. As Dr. Lipsitch put it: in a pandemic, good information saves lives.
Trust is something we extend only when we feel uncertain and vulnerable. That is exactly the moment trusted news organizations earn their reputation — by being reliable, by being consistent, and by owning their mistakes when they make them. National brands like The Washington Post and the BBC do it at scale. Local reporters do it on the ground, in the same communities as their readers, sometimes at real personal risk.
A higher mission — and the money to fund it
The pandemic put news organizations in an unusual position: audience attention surged while the people doing the reporting faced the same health and financial pressure as everyone else. Subscription growth has been encouraging, and many outlets dropped their paywalls to make life-saving information freely available. But subscriptions aren’t the primary revenue line for most digital publishers. Advertising is.
And here’s the missed opportunity. Advertising is supposed to follow attention. News, in this period, was the single biggest pool of attention on the open web — and a lot of advertisers were doing the opposite of following it, because programmatic keyword blocking and brand-safety lists were treating “coronavirus” and “news” like radioactive material.
The trust halo runs both ways
The research on this is well established: advertising adjacent to trusted, high-reputation news inherits some of that trust. The inverse is also true — appearing inside low-trust environments costs brands more than they realize. TRUSTX was built on the idea that trust has to be paired with transparency, simplicity, scale, and automation, or it’s just a tagline.
The ask is plain. Stop blocking the news. Lean into it. Support local journalism — it’s the most aligned advertising buy you will ever make. And to the largest gatekeepers in the ecosystem: lead. Turn off the “avoid coronavirus” safety toggle. Let funding flow where the audience is. Because good information really does save lives.
Originally published on trustx.org.