"Trust in news has eroded worldwide. According to the Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report 2020, fewer than four in ten people (38%) across 40 markets say they typically trust most news. While trust has fallen by double digit margins in recent years in many places, including Brazil and the United Kingdom, in other countries more stable overall trends conceal stark and growing partisan divides. Why is trust eroding, how does it play out across different contexts and different groups, what are the implications, and what might be done about it? These are the organising questions behind the Trust in News Project. This report is the first of many we will publish from the project over the next three years. Because trust is a relationship between trustors and trustees, we anticipate focusing primarily on audiences and the way they think about trust, but we begin the project by taking stock of how those who study journalism and those who practice it think about the subject [...] We focus on media environments in four democracies – Brazil, India, the United Kingdom, and the United States. These countries encompass both the Global South and North, with a range of cultural heterogeneity and political practices that vary in their partisan and populist tendencies. For our purposes, one of the most important differences across these countries is in how audiences have integrated digital and social media practices into how they consume news. Whereas public social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter have rapidly become key conduits of information in democracies worldwide, many of those we interviewed pointed to the popularity of encrypted messaging services like WhatsApp, specifically in Brazil and India, which have combined with deficits in digital literacy to serve as a ‘breeding ground’ for misinformation and disinformation (Chakrabarti et al. 2018). As Irineu Machado, head of content delivery at UOL (Brazil), told us, audiences increasingly ‘distrust organisations who traditionally’ cover news and ‘distrust information in general’, and some rely not just on public social networking sites but also private groups and messaging applications [...] This report is divided into two main sections. First, we outline important lessons from existing research and practitioners’ observations on trust in news. Second, we identify outstanding questions that we expect will guide our project in the years ahead." (Introduction)