For as long as we’ve been talking about journalism’s credibility crisis, we’ve been talking about one possible solution: more transparency about how journalists do their jobs.

The story goes like this: People distrust the news because they don’t know how it gets made, which leads to inaccurate assumptions about journalists’ motivations and practices. So if journalists want to improve people’s trust in news, they need to show people how they go about their reporting, and why their stories come out the way that they do. This argument has its challengers, but maintains its appealing for two reasons. It’s straightforward, and it suggests journalists hold a great deal of influence over how people feel about their work.

What this approach doesn’t consider, however, is something that journalists will finally reckon with in 2025: that people are skeptical of news because they believe journalists prioritize profits above truth or public service.

Those working in journalism might think this idea is crazy. The news industry’s economics have been dismal for decades. Why would people suspect journalists of putting profits over the public in a profession that is known for having so little profit to go around in the first place? Yet a study I recently co-authored with Seth Lewis and Brent Cowley that drew on in-depth interviews with adults representing a cross-section of age, political leaning, socioeconomic status, and gender found that people’s distrust in news do not stem from assumptions that journalists are hopelessly biased or incompetent. Instead, they believe that news organizations report the news inaccurately because they simply want to generate larger audiences — and therefore larger profits. As one interviewee told us, “It’s profits over journalism and over truth.” Another said of subscriptions to news organizations, “They get you to pay for that and — poof — you’re a sucker.”

In 2025, journalists will acknowledge that people’s skepticism toward news is fundamentally tied up in their unflattering misunderstandings about how journalists — and the organizations they work for — make money. Journalism stakeholders will need to grapple with this gap between the reality and perception when it comes to how money shapes journalism if they want to begin to meaningfully tackle journalism’s growing trust problem. Just as journalists learned to overcome their initial reservations about showing the public how their news gets produced, they will once again learn to get over themselves enough so that they can show the public how their news gets paid for.

This means newsrooms managers will share more about their funding, journalists will share more about their salaries, and employees on both sides of the “firewall” between business and editorial will publicly grapple with the ways they attempt to maintain that firewall and the extent to which it actually exists. A good place to start would be a simple explainer for audiences that guides them through what a “firewall” even means in the first place. Nonprofit newsrooms have been especially open when it comes to sharing the relationship between their business models and their approach to their audiences. They’re charting a path that for-profit newsrooms will hopefully follow.

“We don’t talk about how money influences our journalism,” wrote Trusting News executive director Joy Mayer a few months ago. In 2025, we will.