The Trust Shift: Why Credibility Now Follows Proximity, Not Prestige
Part 2 of 6: The Structural Crisis in Public Relations
Why Credibility Now Follows Proximity, Not Prestige
A decade ago, if you wanted to establish credibility for a company, the path was clear: land a feature in a top-tier outlet, get quoted by a respected journalist, earn the institutional stamp of approval. The audience would receive that signal and update their perception accordingly. Credibility flowed from institutions to individuals, a one-way transfer of legitimacy that PR was purpose-built to facilitate.
That transfer no longer works the way it used to. Not because institutional media lost all authority (it didn't) but because the audience developed their own.
When trust reorganized
As the shared reference points described in Part 1 eroded (fewer common media experiences, more algorithmic fragmentation, audiences becoming participants instead of receivers) trust didn't disappear. It reorganized.
People increasingly place credibility not in institutional authority, but in proximity. In voices that feel culturally fluent, values-aligned, and embedded in their world. A developer trusts a developer who's shipped production code over a journalist generalizing about the industry. A founder trusts another founder who's been through the same fundraise over an analyst writing from the outside. A consumer trusts a creator who uses the product daily over a brand making claims about it.
The Edelman Trust Barometer (25 years of data across 28 markets and 33,000 respondents) tracks this shift with uncomfortable precision. In the 2025 report, scientists and teachers are the most trusted groups globally (77% and 75%). Journalists sit at 52%, barely above the neutral threshold and below "my neighbors." CEOs in general are trusted by 53%. Among respondents with high levels of institutional grievance, trust in people occupying "formal positions of power" drops to 48%. As Edelman frames it: influence is earned through compassion, not power.
The pattern is clear. Trust follows proximity to experience, to context, to shared reality. Not proximity to a masthead or a title.
The credibility of "close enough"
This isn't about influencers replacing journalists. It's about why proximity-based trust works in a fragmented environment.
When audiences share a common media landscape, institutional authority is efficient. One trusted source can speak credibly to many. But when audiences fragment into distinct cultural contexts (when a developer community, a parenting forum, and a fintech Twitter circle all occupy different informational realities) no single institutional voice can be contextually fluent across all of them.
Proximity fills the gap. A creator who lives inside a specific community understands its language, its references, its skepticisms, and its values. They don't need institutional credentials to be credible because their credibility comes from being embedded, from demonstrating through sustained presence that they understand the audience's world from the inside.
The Reuters Institute's 2025 Digital News Report captures this concretely. In the United States, social media and video platforms overtook both TV news and news websites as the primary news source for the first time. One in five Americans encountered podcast host Joe Rogan discussing news in a given week, reaching audiences (particularly young men) that traditional media struggles to access at all. In France, young creator Hugo Travers reaches 22% of under-35s through YouTube and TikTok, comparable to many mainstream French news organizations. In Thailand, social media influencers are reshaping information consumption entirely, making it more outspoken and less formal.
These creators don't have the investigative resources of a newsroom. What they have is contextual fluency: the ability to speak to a specific audience in a way that feels native rather than broadcast. In a fragmented world, that contextual fluency is increasingly what determines who gets heard.
Attention rewards experience, not explanation
The trust shift is reinforced by a parallel change in how people process information.
Video and audio now command more attention than text. Social video news consumption grew from 52% to 65% between 2020 and 2025 according to Reuters. In countries like India, the Philippines, and Thailand, more people now prefer to watch news than read it. Across all markets, 75% consume some form of video news weekly, up from 67% five years ago.
This isn't a format preference. It's a cognitive one. Video and audio convey presence, tone, and personality in ways text cannot. Influence increasingly operates through exposure and interaction, through the feeling of knowing someone, rather than through carefully structured argument. A podcast host who speaks for two hours in a conversational register creates a sense of proximity that a 600-word article, however well-reported, cannot replicate.
PR's traditional strengths are written, sequential, and rational: the press release, the briefing document, the carefully worded statement. These still have their place. But in an environment where perception is shaped continuously through audio, video, and participatory formats, they are no longer the primary instruments of influence. The gap between how PR creates credibility and how audiences actually form trust is widening.
When expertise becomes distributed
There's a final dimension that makes this shift structural: expertise itself has become distributed.
As access to information increased, more people developed real domain-specific knowledge. A cybersecurity community can fact-check a breach report in real time. A developer community evaluates a product launch before any press coverage appears. A patient community knows more about living with a specific condition than most journalists writing about it.
These audiences don't reject institutional media entirely. They consume it. But they no longer assume it's definitive. The Reuters report found that younger audiences have developed what researchers describe as a "flatter pattern of trust": gathering information across sources without a shared sense of a "hierarchy of validation." There's no default assumption that a Wall Street Journal article is more credible than a well-sourced Substack post or a detailed Reddit analysis. Credibility is assessed case by case, based on demonstrated expertise and contextual relevance.
This is not a "fake news" problem. It's what happens when knowledge spreads. Authority fragments because no single source can credibly claim complete understanding of every domain. The generalist reporter covering AI for a mainstream outlet is competing for credibility with engineers who build the systems. The agency pitching a healthcare story is operating in a world where patient communities have already formed their own interpretation.
PR was historically optimized for a world where institutional trust was the reserve currency, where a Forbes feature or a CNN segment conferred automatic legitimacy. That currency still has value. But it's no longer the reserve currency. Authority is contextual now. Expertise is judged by relevance to a specific audience, not by institutional standing alone. Navigating this environment requires cultural fluency and contextual judgment that can't be abstracted into a media list and a press release.
Where this leads
The attention shift described in Part 1 fractured the playing field. The trust shift described here fractured the rules. PR now operates in a world where credibility is contextual, audiences have domain expertise, influence travels through proximity rather than prestige, and the formats that build trust are shifting away from the industry's traditional strengths.
These forces alone would be enough to force a serious reckoning. But they're compounded by a third pressure, one that comes not from the audience or the media landscape, but from inside the organizations that fund PR. A business culture that increasingly demands quantitative proof for every dollar spent, colliding with a discipline whose value has always been, by nature, qualitative.
That collision is where the structural crisis gets personal.
Jessen Gibbs is CEO and Co-Founder of Shadow, an AI-native PR agency built by embedding inside the world's best communications firms.