How Axios builds trust in an uneasy media landscape

Our next guest is emphasizing the value of trust: a very important thing in relationships, but it’s also very important for managing your information flow. Kim Hart is managing editor at Axios, and has also been part of the D.C community as a columnist at the Washington Post, and as a communications spokesman for the Federal Communications Commission.

ABERMAN: Let’s talk first about your current gig. Axios is a name that many of us know, but what exactly is Axios up to here in town?

HART: Great question! So, Axios just celebrated its first anniversary. We launched the same week as Donald Trump’s inauguration, in fact, and we started as a place where people could go to have an answer to the information overload that we all feel these days. There’s this proliferation of information, and news, and sites, and outlets, and I think a lot of people find it hard to digest, and find what it is they need to know in their busy lives.

So, Axios tried to become a platform that could break through some of that noise, and tell people what they need to know, in short, digestible stories. That doesn’t mean that it’s dumbed down, or higher level, or just skims the surface. We really do try to provide as much context as is needed for the reader to really understand the dynamic of a particular event, or news announcement, or big thing that happened at the White House, or something that happened on Wall Street. Here’s what happened. Here’s why it matters. Here’s why you should care, and here’s what to watch next.

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ABERMAN: And it’s not just politics. And I think that’s very endemic of the way a lot of people think of D.C., they just think politics, but the reality is that this place is a cross section of business, finance, social trends, politics. It’s everything.

HART: Absolutely. And that was also one of the founding premises of Axios, which was to try to connect the dots between all of these different areas of coverage that you just mentioned. People tend to think of politics as a siloed news platform, or business as its own little world that doesn’t really connect with politics. Or technology, the same way. And what Mike Allen, and Roy Schwartz, and Jim VandeHei, who founded Axios a year ago, really wanted to do was help readers understand how all those worlds are colliding, and connect the dots in interesting ways that you don’t necessarily find at some of the larger publications.

ABERMAN: Your business model is to basically be a curator, but also to be an “expertizer”: you take information and say, we reviewed this and this is what is true, which really has let you personally into very much. You’re in the middle of trying to think through, how do people know what’s true? How do they trust information?

HART: Right! And it really comes down to trust in the journalist, and trust the people who are providing that information to you. So, what we do is, to your point earlier, we do curate news. We aggregate news that we think is important, that is legitimate, that we vet ourselves, and tell people why it’s important, why they should know about it. But we also are doing a ton of original reporting every day as well, that complements that, and expand on the news that we see in other publications, and really tries to create an ecosystem that is not only trustworthy, but also feels worthy of people coming there and spending their time with us.

ABERMAN: So how does trust, and curation, not become spin?

HART: Part of the model that we have created is to bring in people who have a lot of expertise in the areas that they cover. So, they’ve been doing this for a long time. They’re not, you know, fresh out of college journalists, although we do have some of those who are really smart and help us to aggregate the news, and make sure we’re on top of everything that breaking. But we really bring in people who have been involved in business, involved in politics, involved in technology for a very long time. So, they have a pretty good bull radar, if you will, and can tell when they’re being spun, and can usually anticipate what the spin will be, and can even tell that to readers like.

If there’s a story coming out of the White House, a story coming out of a major Fortune 100 company, we can say, in a contextualizing, analysis way, what you’re going to hear from this company is X, Y, and Z, or here’s what the White House is probably going to say in response to this, to point out that, yes, we know all of the different factors going into this. We know all of the different competing pressures, and the spin dynamic that is happening all around us, but we’re trying to break through that, and tell you just what’s happening in an unbiased objective way, which I think is important in today’s news economy, and explain why, in the larger frame of the information world that we’re faced with every day, what it means.

ABERMAN: Trust is truth now. At some level, trust is something that I believe, you’ve pointed out in one of your studies, our country is declining in trust, compared to other places.

HART: Yes! In fact, it is in an unprecedented decline right now. The Edelman Trust Barometer study is an annual survey that Edelman puts out every year, that looks at trust in institutions around the world. They’ve done it for many years, and this year just came out a couple of weeks ago. This year, it showed dramatic collapse of trust in America, of all institutions. And that covers business, NGOs, the government, and media.

The media, in fact, worldwide, has seen the biggest decline of the trust across the board. In fact, more than half of people say that they can’t tell between fake news and real news now. That’s a real problem for the journalism industry, but also the future of democracy, that really depends on everyone being able to agree on an objective truth.

ABERMAN: I have had people tell me, when I discuss this issue of what’s truth, and objective reality, they say Americans don’t care about what’s true. But yet, if that was the case, they wouldn’t be as disaffected with institutions as they are. They must be angry that they’re not hearing objective reality.

HART: Absolutely. I think that there’s a real thirst out there, a real hunger, for news, and some sources of information that they can count on to get just the facts. I don’t necessarily want the spin. I don’t really want to have an only-liberal point of view on this, or a super-conservative point of view on this. I want to make up my own mind, so give me the facts, give me both sides, and let me figure out what I think about that. And I think that that’s actually why Axios has hit such a strong nerve in D.C., because we’re at a time when the media is so polarized.

There are so many very left-wing outlets, very right-wing outlets, and that was exploited very much over the past few election cycles, and we’ve gotten to a point now where people, like my friends, who are very well informed people in Washington, who’ve been in this town for a long time, have said to me, I don’t even know what to believe anymore. I don’t know what’s true. And that’s pretty scary, when people who understand how Washington works, understand how the business world works, are feeling that way.

Can you imagine how people who aren’t as savvy to the way of Washington, or Wall Street, or how things get done in these various big epicenters of commerce, they’re sitting in cities all across the country? They’re teachers, they’re firefighters, they’re police officers. They’re people that we rely on to protect us, and keep our society moving. And they’re also having this really hard time understanding what is truth.

ABERMAN: That was Kim Hart, managing editor at Axios. Kim, thanks for joining us.

HART: Thank you!

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