Since 2011, fatal shark attacks have occurred at Reunion Island, a French overseas territory, and have led to a social crisis that has brought up different societal issues about risk management. The technocratic risk management model, which includes scientific expertise, was adopted by authorities to aid political decision-making. However, this model was strongly contested by sea users at risk of shark attacks. The intense local media coverage of shark risk and the apparent decrease of confidence in expertise led us to question, according to a communicational approach, how the changing media landscape could contribute to the social construction of trust in traditional media and scientific expertise. We interviewed six local journalists from local online press, seven experts from French national institutes, and one sea user from a local sea users’ association. Information overload seems to be one of the common challenges of the changing media landscape faced by journalists and scientists. For journalists, the problems linked to the mediatization of scientific discourses add to other global issues of information production, which seeks to satisfy readership and provide credible information, with consideration of economic, temporal and format constraints imposed by the free online press business model. Some experts believe that easy access to scientific information on the Internet can destabilize their public credibility, especially with lay sea users, who can appropriate this information as part of their delegitimization strategy against scientific expertise. The social process of constructing confidence in scientific expertise and traditional media is actually shaped by many social issues beyond the changing media landscape. To discuss this construction of confidence, we proposed to discuss the objectivity of each party guided by their cultural resonances through the scientific expertise epistemological approach, the journalists’ relationships network, and also the historical, social, cultural, political and scientific context in which these parties interact.