Why News Audiences Trust Sound – And What it Means for News Brands
Creating a news brand that cuts through, connects with audiences, and consistently stays that way is no easy feat. Whether your focus is local, national, or international, growing and maintaining dedicated viewers means creating trust – through your coverage, stories, and relatability, but also through your branding. Of the many brand assets at your disposal, sound is one of the strongest for building awareness and connection with audiences. Here’s why a sonic strategy should be at the top of your list if you’re looking to strengthen your news branding.
The benefits to having a defined, ownable voice in the news industry are well established. For years, leading networks like CNN, NewsNation, and Al Jazeera, as well as local stations like PIX11 (New York) and KTLA (Los Angeles), have worked to distinguish themselves among audiences with unique sets, colors, personalities, storytelling style, and music. All of these elements build consistency and familiarity – the building blocks of trust among audiences.
It All Starts With Trust
Trust is strongly tied to familiarity and brand recognition. According to Reuters Institute, “people are more likely to trust news brands they recognize and are familiar with” [Source: Reuters Institute – Digital News Report]. But trust isn’t solely about recognition and familiarity. There also has to be an emotional element in order for audiences to truly connect with a brand. This is where sound is most effective.
Humans are innately wired to react emotionally to sound – we hear something, we feel something. In fact, we process sound in the area of the brain responsible for emotion and memory. This means that when we experience audio, for instance a news show intro, we feel a set of emotions that over time become associated with that program. But how do these feelings lead to trust?
It has been shown that trust is commonly an emotional first, rational second determination. Trust judgements are often made via our System 1 processing – fast, automatic, intuitive, unconscious thinking – before analytical evaluation [Source: Kahneman – Thinking, Fast and Slow]. What this means is that news brands can elicit feelings of trust through emotional cues like music, tone of voice, body language, and presentation. They can then reinforce these feelings with credibility signals such as perceived expertise, accuracy, and transparency [Source: American Press Institute – The Meaning of Trust in News]. In this way, how well your music aligns with your messaging and other brand elements speaks volumes about the trustworthiness of your news brand.
Adding Music to the Brand Asset Mix
Music is one of the strongest assets when it comes to building awareness, and ultimately, trust – especially for news brands. Sonic branding cues are capable of increasing brand awareness by over 8x, making them the most powerful, yet least used, brand asset [Source: Ipsos, The Power of You]. Consider the number of audio cues it takes to produce a single news program – opens, stings, beds, transitions, alerts, segment IDs. The opportunity to strengthen trust through sound is undeniable.
Next steps: If you’re a news brand, take a moment to listen to yourself. What does your music and audio say about you? How well does it reflect your station, channel, or network’s personality and tone of voice? How does it make your audience feel? Does it align with your core values? And does it sound consistent across various mediums and platforms?
If any of these answers are unclear or feel out of alignment, sound should be at the top of your list in 2026 for building trusted connections with audiences.