Newsrooms and Transparency in the Digital Age

Abstract

Facing a decline in public credibility, news organizations have been encouraged to embrace transparency to combat rising public distrust. In this paper, we examine how journalists at six leading news outlets in the United States grapple with the concept of transparency and its implementation in their newsrooms. Our data indicate that news outlets engage in a limited and strategic form of transparency that enable them to appear transparent without offering substantive insights into the journalistic process.