Journalists & Advertisers Are In The Same Business: Trust

Published B&T

Journalists and advertisers are in the same business: the trust business. That’s according to former BBC News Washington, Sydney and New York correspondent Nick Bryant.

“Those worlds aren’t exclusive,” Bryant told the Marketing Association of Australia x B&T Brand Masters podcast following his keynote talk at the RESET conference in Sydney.

“What the BBC found over the years is that advertisers and it were in the same business — the trust business. If you have a news brand, you rely on trust. If you have a product, you rely on trust. Without that, you have nothing.”

To hear the full chat, listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

Bryant enjoyed a nearly 27-year career with the BBC, beginning as a news trainee in September 1994 and becoming Washington correspondent in November 1998, following his reporting on the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal.

“It was one of the first big stories I got to cover. They sent me over to Washington when I was a young guy and I got to cover what we called the Monica Lewinsky scandal… we should have called it the Bill Clinton scandal,” he told Cairns Crocodiles content director Pippa Chambers and B&T editor Tom Fogden.

“It was an extraordinary moment. Partly because of the way that the story came out.

Legacy media, Newsweek magazine, which was a really big deal back then, had this story that Clinton was having an affair but chose to sit on the story and not publish it. A guy who was unknown then called Matt Drudge published it in the Drudge Report. Suddenly, you had this fascinating moment when everyone was going online — a new thing back then — to figure out what this guy Drudge was saying and bypassing the legacy media… Traditional news media was no longer the gate keeper of news. In fact, there weren’t any gates any more.”

The legacy media today faces a raft of challenges — from AI to large digital platforms and social media.

But Australia, according to Bryant, is particularly well-suited and seems, at the moment, to have the political will to become a “laboratory” for ways to combat those challenges, from the News Bargaining Incentive to AI regulation.

To hear the full chat, listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

The series is sponsored by CRA – Commercial Radio & Audio.