News and Media Trust in Kenya: Individualism, Communalism and Hybridity in Young People’s Online News Consumption Experiences

The increased adoption and adaptation of mobile devices have triggered new debates on trust, particularly on the quality of news accessed and consumed online. This study adopts a contextually grounded, user-centric approach to understanding how the social construction of trust, as a way of being, shapes news media and content trust at individual, communal, and hybrid levels. “News media” refers to the digital platforms used to disseminate news, while “news content” is the messages conveyed via these platforms. These two are often treated as the same, yet they shape news consumption experiences in different ways. With this in mind, this study employed a mixed-methods approach, whereby data was generated in two phases. The first phase was a survey involving 800 respondents at two public universities in Kenya. The second phase consisted of seven focus group discussions whose participants were selected from among the first-phase respondents. Findings show that news consumption is primarily shaped by perceptions of the level of trust enacted by specific news channels or platforms at and across different times and places. The communal construction of trust is relative to individual audience needs, or, in this case, individualism; this means that it is possible to trust a specific news channel in a specific moment, depending on the perceived authenticity of specific news sub-genres. Platforms, in part, serve the purpose of fulfilling diverse young people's gratification needs, ranging from socialisation to entertainment, informational needs, self-documentation, and surveillance of their various sub-domains of the world.