How Media Can Better Serve the Public: CEO Lisa Gibbs Joins TrustMakers

Pulitzer Center CEO Lisa Gibbs joined Justin Blake, Executive Director of the Edelman Trust Institute, for a conversation about the growing trust gap in media and the role journalism can play in bridging divides and improving public understanding.

Read a transcript of the conversation below.

Justin Blake: Welcome to the Trustmakers. Hi. I'm Justin Blake, Executive Director of the Edelman Trust Institute. At a moment when misinformation is widespread, trust is fractured, and people are retreating into like-minded silos, journalism can play a vital role in restoring shared understanding and helping people make sense of the world around them. The 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer found that 75% of people believe the media has an obligation to help bridge divides and facilitate trust building amongst those with differences, yet only 40% of our respondents say the media is doing well at it. So what does it look like for journalism to meet that responsibility and earn back trust?

Today, I'm joined by Lisa Gibbs, CEO of the Pulitzer Center. Lisa spent more than two decades working as a journalist and editor, including four years as Executive Business editor for the Miami Herald and nine years with the Associated Press where she served as global business editor and later vice president of philanthropic development. In her current role at the Pulitzer Center, Lisa has turned her focus on building trust in media and educating the next generation of journalists. Lisa, welcome to the trust makers.

Lisa Gibbs: Thank you so much for having me.

Justin Blake: Lisa, to ground our conversation, can you talk to us about your work at the Pulitzer Center?

Lisa Gibbs: Sure. At the Pulitzer Center, we work with hundreds of journalists and media organizations around the world to provide the support they need to produce the most ambitious reporting projects, so that might include grants to cover reporting costs, training, investigative tools—and all of that together adds up to about 250 projects around the world each year that we support, that are published in everything from like the smallest local outlets, podcasters, broadcasters, all the way up to the very biggest global news agencies.

Justin Blake: Great. Can you talk a little bit more about some of these initiatives? Maybe give a few examples.

Lisa Gibbs: So one of the things we do, for example, is that for several years now, we've run a fellowship reporting program for journalists who are interested in reporting on tropical forests and the ocean around the world. Climate and the environment is a very big program of ours. So journalists who have interest in doing year long projects, you know, projects that require data analysis, deep levels of reporting and support, they participate in our programs, and we are helping them to execute these projects at a time when their news organizations may no longer have the support systems or simply the dollars to allow for that kind of ambitious reporting. And I know it's ambitious reporting around some of the most important and impactful issues of our time.

Justin Blake: Talk to our listeners a little bit about that focus.

Lisa Gibbs: In the early days of the Pulitzer Center, we identified a gap as news organizations were closing bureaus outside the U.S. We were concerned about the loss of international reporting, and where U.S. audiences were going to understand what was happening in the rest of the world, especially difficult places. Conflict zones, the origin story of the Pulitzer Center. And then over 20 years, that has evolved into an approach that, you know, it's not just international reporting that news organizations need help with these complicated topics, whether it's climate or AI, the impact of AI on society or the complexities of global health. It's not about location. It's about, thematically, these are challenging topics, and so we want to be the place that journalists come to, to be able to get the support—both the funding and the expertise. They need to be able to help increase public understanding of some very complicated issues.

Justin Blake: And what's happened in terms of the context for media that has led you to change the focus a little bit more into some of these very challenging and difficult issues that you focus on?

Lisa Gibbs: I'll say a couple of things here. I mean, one is that just as these issues can be difficult to report on by journalists, they're also difficult to understand by the public. So there's this alignment between audience needs and their own audience. Want to know what's happening with my environment, you know, with my health system. How is AI changing the world? And so, what we're doing is we're thinking about trying to match up where there are gaps in public understanding along with gaps in news media resources.

The other thing I'd say is that as the information ecosystem has become increasingly crowded to the point where many news consumers feel overwhelmed. That fact has also really informed our own evolution in an organization that cares much more about audience engagement and public engagement around journalism.

Justin Blake: What is something that you've learned in terms of ensuring that some of those stories have reached an impact? And I also say that with having a bit of an understanding that much of the work that you're doing is also to build understanding, and it might not be the typical clickbait journalism. So how do you build an audience for credible, fact-based, maybe less salacious journalism?

Lisa Gibbs: Well, you're absolutely right that, you know, the more rigorous—I'll call it investigative and explanatory journalism. You know, the journalism that goes deeper, that explores long-term impacts of today's news event? That is absolutely the area that we're working on. You know what we know today, especially as we have seen audiences for traditional media outlets decline, it's no longer the case that you can publish a story and expect impact to happen magically, right? You need to really plan and design for impact from the beginning. And you know, some of these bigger topics, bigger pieces like that, it's worthy of this kind of investment and impact, right?

So it starts with really thinking about, well, who is the audience that we need to reach with this story, and who are the people who are likely to be most impacted, likely to have something that they can actually do about the problem. Let's start with that, and then think about strategies that are going to make sure this piece of journalism is reaching those audiences. To give you some examples of what those strategies look like. I mean, it could be anything from making sure a really important story from a local news outlet gets wider distribution through a partnership with global news, that connection between global and local. That's one area. We might work with influencers to develop some campaigns to help amplify the story.

Sometimes you just have to take the journalism directly into the community, putting journalists, researchers, and community groups in the same room and having a conversation, working with educators in high schools and universities to bring the topics into the classrooms. And it's not any one thing, right? It's a variety of strategies that are all about, as one of my team members says, squeezing the juice out of the journalism.

Justin Blake: You talked about the work you do with educators. I know that's also something that's personally an incredible passion for you. Can you talk a little bit more about what the Pulitzer Center does with educators?

Lisa Gibbs: Yes, we have a couple of different approaches. So we do work with several journalism schools, you know, primarily in the United States, but not only because we're thinking about how to prepare the next generation of journalists.

The work I really want to talk about relates to youth engagement overall, you know, especially at a time when youth are reporting higher levels of disconnection and feelings of disconnection, or, you know, mental health issues or information overload. How do we help them understand the world around them? I'll give you an example for middle and high schools. We operate contests that invite students to write a poem about a piece of journalism. It's called the fighting words poetry contest. We've been doing it for several years now, and what teachers tell us is that by asking the student to process a piece of journalism in a very personal way through creative expression, this connects them to their world in a very important way. So that's one example.

We do a lot of work with college programs, not [only focused on] journalism. How are we bringing important pieces of health journalism into public health classrooms? So, you know, engaging future leaders. How are we helping them through journalism understand some of the real world issues? How, beyond textbook learning, journalism can be a force for helping them understand their purpose and role as a professional?

Justin Blake: There's some conventional wisdom that would say that media literacy, even amongst some of the highly educated cohorts that you just alluded to, is strongly on the decline. Is that your observation, and if that conventional wisdom is true, what are you seeing as some of the best strategies to build back that form of media literacy?

Lisa Gibbs: Yeah. I mean, it's an interesting question, because we at the Pulitzer Center have never described ourselves as teaching media literacy. It's more, how are we activating journalism to essentially help improve literacy with the world, right? Or, you know, on the particular issues. What we have found is that through our approach, we are essentially teaching media literacy, because we're showing both the value of independent journalism, but also the skills that underlie that story. Students are incredibly curious about how journalists got that story. Or, you know, what was it like to spend time in that place, or with talking to that person.

And so through those kinds of conversations, we do find it's increasing understanding of how journalism works. Another thing for me that comes to mind is that we're having a lot of conversations with middle and high school teachers about AI literacy, and it's really about, you know, how do we harness journalism to help students, or everyone, become more critical consumers, better consumers of AI. And I think even as we're dealing with generations whose information habits have been informed by algorithmic driven platforms. In a lot of ways, they only know, well, information is pushed to me, I don't have to actively seek it.

Another way to approach this question of media literacy is actually through the lens of AI accountability and just helping them understand why they're seeing the information they're seeing, and how to query that and what it means.

Justin Blake: What sort of initiatives do you have going to help build what I guess I'll now say in shorthand, AI literacy amongst people?

Lisa Gibbs: A few years ago, when generative AI really exploded onto the scene, we identified a real gap in journalists' understanding of the technology. And I'm not talking about people who are covering the tech beat who you know theoretically understand all of this. I'm talking about people on the Health beat or covering local governments or law enforcement, or as AI systems are deployed across all of these industries. How are you going to report on your area if you don't understand how the technology works? And they didn't, so we launched a training program called the AI Spotlight Series, which was designed to train journalists. Here's how you understand what AI is, what it isn't. You know how it works, how to ask critical questions, and you know, really kind of think through the ways it's being used.

That training program has now reached more than 3,000 journalists around the world in six languages. Demand continues to be off the charts, and we're developing some new modules around AI and politics, that sort of thing. What we have also seen is big demand from educators as well as nonprofit organizations. Wow, we need the AI Spotlight Series. We need to understand how this technology works and how to think critically about it. So we are in the process. One of the initiatives is to adapt the AI Spotlight Series that originally was for journalists, for some of these broader audiences.

Justin Blake: With the goal of just helping increase AI literacy overall, do you see the goal between AI literacy having any connection to building trust in AI, or the connection between AI and trusted journalism? Because it'd be pretty easy to say that right now, it seems like the threat of AI or people wondering whether a story was written by AI and if anyone ever edited it could really just corrode trust in journalism overall.

Lisa Gibbs: I mean, you're the expert on this, of course, but the more people understand an issue, the more they're able to evaluate those questions and have that trust. So I think that there's a certain element to that that's positive. I think the question of AI and newsroom specifically, there's just so many conversations that have been going on about the right ways to use AI in the production of content as well as, how can it be an effective tool for news discovery as well as personalization and those kinds of things?

I believe, having worked on some of these areas, that there are very legitimate and helpful ways that AI technologies can actually elevate the craft of journalism by freeing, eliminating routine tasks that otherwise would keep journalists from doing the important work they're doing. One of the ways to start with approaching it is to just be radically transparent about the use of those tools in explaining how was this story produced with the help of an automated template? Or, was it partially written by a language model, or whatever, you know, whatever the case is. I think that it starts with that kind of radical transparency.

Justin Blake: One of the findings from the Trust Barometer that we put out that has just stuck in my brain this whole time is that only 39% of our global respondents say they regularly get information from sources with a different political leaning than their own. To me, the 39% in itself isn't totally shocking. What is is that it's gone down six points in one year, so that there's this extreme move to insularity and information bubbles. At the Pulitzer Center, how are you thinking about the impact of information echo chambers and how to combat them, assuming that you think combating them is important?

Lisa Gibbs: Yeah, of course. I think I touched earlier on the role that algorithms are playing in driving the information sources that we're even seeing in ways that a lot of people don't fully understand and are aware of. And I do believe this isn't actually an existential challenge. What's interesting is, there are strategies that relate to the way journalists use language. Language really matters, and the way you frame a story, the language you're using on social media for example, has a direct effect on the chances that your story will get seen by a wider audience. But I think, really understanding those algorithms and investing in  the expertise to understand how to navigate that is really important.

And I think the other thing that's happening is that, you see, not just because of the echo chamber issue, but also because in the disruption to search traffic that's happened with AI engines, being part of the main search engines, understanding the importance of building direct relationships with their audiences, I think there's way more conversation happening in the industry about the importance of audience, the importance of community engagement, the need to do that and not hack the algorithm, or hack these systems in ways that help do that. I also—this is a whole other topic, but I do want to bring up—I think it's impossible to talk about trust and echo chambers and media without talking about the very real business considerations and business trends that are underlying this. So I'd like to talk about that a little bit, if that's okay.

Justin Blake: Well, then how about I ask you a question. Please talk about the business trends undergirding this.

Lisa Gibbs: Great. You know, I think in particular, when we think about the polarized media, you know, “Oh, this is partisan media.” I mean, let's talk about the United States, but in many other countries too, especially Global North countries, there's been just an incredible loss of staffing, particularly at local news organizations, who, up until now, have been the ones writing or producing journalism about the issues that are very relevant to you in your community.

In the last 20 years, I think the statistic is something like 70,000 journalists jobs have been lost from local newsrooms in the United States. Imagine the importance of that information that has now kind of disappeared from view. And so, in many cases, all people have left is national news, and news about politics, or big breaking news, even the likelihood that anyone will encounter a journalist in their everyday life. And so all of these things, I think, really roll up to this issue of how people see trust or, you know, how people trust media, or how they see media as being slanted or not slanted.

In a lot of cases, they don't really know anything else really. This is obviously a complex issue, and it's multifaceted, but you know, it's something that I keep coming back to is that, as you have fewer and fewer resources, newsrooms, sometimes, unfortunately, just now, we're on a hamster wheel, like we just got to get out more, more, more to try to get those clicks and get that audience. I think this is where Pulitzer Center can really help, by helping newsrooms build capacity for that public engagement, as there are fewer and fewer resources, and the Pulitzer Center has been a resource for providing that kind of community engagement and helping to fund credible journalism.

Justin Blake: You're celebrating your 20th year, so maybe let's try to end on a positive future state, which is, we're sitting here 20 years from now, what has happened that's gonna have you have the great smile you just showed me on your face? Tell me something that will have happened in the last 20 years that shows that Pulitzer Center will have been successful, and there would have been a real uptick and positive trend towards trusted journalism.

Lisa Gibbs: I mean, partly, I'm smiling because I feel like I don't know what's going to happen next month, much less 20 years from now. I mean, certainly this work we're doing that is seeing journalism through the lens of civic engagement and public understanding. I think that we have a really powerful model as we do more and more of that and show other newsrooms and journalists how to do it. My hope would be that we could get to a future state where that just becomes the way we do journalism, and then we have built that trust along with it. So I don't know, I just walked you on a little bit of a journey there, but hopefully it made sense.

Justin Blake: I think that is a good aspiration. And Lisa, it's always a pleasure talking to you. I really enjoyed our talk today. Could have asked you about 100 other questions, but also not just thank you for being here, but thank you to you and your whole team for the great work that
you do.

Lisa Gibbs: Oh, thank you so much. It's such a pleasure to be here, and talking with you makes me think big thoughts. So I appreciate that too.

Justin Blake: And to our listeners, thank you for listening to the Trustmakers.