Sometimes, working in journalism education and research can feel like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day: Every time you think you’ve moved on to an exciting new prediction about the future of news, you realize you’re right back to where you started 15 years ago.
Thought you finally crushed the “double down on print, forget the Internet, kill the blogs!” era of journalism? Nope, it reared its mighty head again in late 2016.
Thought you had made headway way back in, say, 2002, arguing that news organizations need to be more transparent about their work in order to garner audience trust? Nope, this is still something that needs to be declared and rediscovered again in the era of Trump.
It’s been a rough year for journalism and democracy, so in the spirit of hope and better things to come, I’m going to tentatively predict that 2018 is the year transparency finally takes hold as an established practice in news organizations. Wishful thinking? Maybe, but I hope not.
Transparency’s roots in American journalism run back to the 1920s, when the press was turning to objectivity as a guiding principle, according to The Elements of Journalism by Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel. But instead of the intellectually-bereft, oft-trumpeted version of objectivity that argues that journalists can and should operate free of any bias, this early conception of objectivity had transparency at its core. The idea was that journalists should develop a consistent approach to verifying information and present that process in a way that people could understand it and make up their own minds what to think. The scientific method on a tighter deadline, if you will.
Kovach and Rosenstiel’s book was first published in 2001, and among other things, it made the case for transparency being an important way that journalists can build credibility. Elements drew on interviews, surveys, and forums with hundreds of journalists, and therefore distilled the core values of many practitioners. It it is still taught in journalism schools around the country, and from 2002 to 2005, I worked with Kovach, Rosentiel, and other leaders in the field to discuss these principles with newsrooms all over the country to figure out how we could best ensure that our daily work was actually living up to these values.
Our workshop modules on bias and verification and transparency were by far our most popular. The media landscape was already increasingly cluttered, even pre-Facebook, and the power of journalists to act as gatekeepers — preventing false information from getting out to the public — was waning. Most newsrooms came to the conclusion during our discussions that it was best to explain to readers not only what they knew, but also what they didn’t know about a given story, and how they had vetted a piece. To not only dig up new facts, but to also serve as a kind of trusted referee of information already out in the public domain, making the value reporters offer more obvious to the audience.
Academics like my friend Doreen Marchionni, now an editor at The Seattle Times, began to do experiments and build evidence that showed that transparency efforts (like explicitly showing how crowdsourcing efforts had contributed to a story) increased credibility, as did reporters that “put themselves out there” as more human, personable, and relatable. It’s not necessarily about disclosing who you voted for or your views on hot button issues, but rather helping people understand who you are and how you go about your daily work.
But change is hard, and even though our workshops on verification and transparency were rated as highly successful by participants, it’s hard to practice what you preach in the hurly burly of a busy newsroom. Also, some journalists have long responded to criticism by digging into assertions of pure objectivity, what sociologist Gaye Tuchman calls a “strategic ritual” that protects journalists from charges of bias. Transparency made inroads, but relatively few organizations or individual journalists made significant progress.
In February, I was at a conference in D.C. about how journalists could regain trust with the public after the polarizing election of 2016 and the constant attacks on the press by the president of the United States. I found myself in the same small-group discussion as Rosenstiel, my former boss, and what we were arguing for was — more or less word for word — the same things we’d said in workshops more than a decade ago. Groundhog Day once again!
Not everyone there bought what we were selling at that conference, but as the year went on, I started to hear more and more calls for transparency. And I was especially pleased to read that transparency was a key theme at the recent Poynter Ethics Summit. Even one of our most well-known journalistic leaders, Washington Post editor Marty Baron noted at the conference: “I think there’s mystery about how we go about our work. Let’s just be more transparent about how we pursued the story.”
With more high-profile news organizations like the Post increasingly embracing transparency, I optimistically predict that after its many stops and starts, it has finally hit its moment, in a country that has never needed great reporting more than it does now. When I tweeted last weekend about how the Post “launched a new series aimed at deconstructing the journalism process while answering questions about how reporting works,” it got a ton more engagement than is the norm. Long-languishing trust in media is finally ticking up, although Republicans continue to express far more negativity toward mainstream media than Democrats.
Having been called “enemies of the people” by our highest-ranking public official, reporters are starting to recognize the importance of not just a knee-jerk defense of their work, but one that shows exactly how they work to uncover wrongdoing and check facts.
Cheers to a better 2018.
Carrie Brown-Smith is director of the social journalism program at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism.
Sydette Harry Listen to your corner and watch for the hook
Rachel Davis Mersey AI, with real smarts
Mary Meehan Real lives are at stake in rural areas
Kathleen McElroy Building a news video experience native to mobile
Alexios Mantzarlis Moving fake news research out of the lab
Richard J. Tofel The platforms’ power demands more reporters’ attention
Millie Tran and Stine Bauer Dahlberg (Hint: It’s about your brand)
Corey Johnson The pro-fact resistance
Heather Bryant Building the ecosystems for collaboration
Evie Nagy Pivot to mobile video frustration
Andrew Ramsammy The year ownership mattered
Corey Ford The empire strikes back
Basile Simon We need better career paths for news nerds
Matt Thompson Here come the attention managers
Imaeyen Ibanga Longform video leads the way
Dheerja Kaur Fun with subscription products
Claire Wardle Disinformation gets worse
Eric Ulken The year local publishers get smart(er) about change
Pablo Boczkowski The rise of skeptical reading
Sam Ford The year of investing in processes
Jennifer Coogan The future is female
Joyce Barnathan It will be harder to bury the news
Christopher Meighan Passive partnership is in the rearview
Mario García Storytelling finally adapts to mobile
Edward Roussel Eyes, ears, and brains
Trushar Barot The Jio-fication of India
Jim Brady With the people, not just of the people
Yvonne Leow The rise of video messaging
Vanessa K. DeLuca Women’s voices take center stage
Felix Salmon Covering bitcoin while owning bitcoin
Ernst-Jan Pfauth Publishing less to give readers more
Aron Pilhofer We can’t leave the business to the business side any more
Justin Kosslyn The year journalists become digital security experts
Jesse Holcomb Information disorder, coming to a congressional district near you
Eric Nuzum Beyond the narrative arc
Monique Judge Letting black women tell their own stories
Tamar Charney We get serious about algorithms
Joanne McNeil Gatekeeping the gatekeepers
Ståle Grut Reclaiming audience interaction from social networks
Mi-Ai Parrish Blockchain and trust
Renée Kaplan The year of quiet adjustments (shhh)
Andrew Haeg The year journalists become relationship builders
Manoush Zomorodi Self-help as a publishing strategy
Carlos Martínez de la Serna The new journalism commons
Steve Grove The midterms are an opportunity
Nushin Rashidian Publishers seek ad dollar alternatives
Matt Boggie The intellectual equivalent of the Dead Sea
Jennifer Choi Standing up for us and for each other
Jacqui Cheng Retailers move into content
Molly de Aguiar Good journalism won’t be enough
Frédéric Filloux External forces
L. Gordon Crovitz Serving readers over advertisers
Lanre Akinola Making noise is not a strategy
C.W. Anderson The social media apocalypse
Jarrod Dicker Honesty in advertising
Mary Walter-Brown Show a little vulnerability
P. Kim Bui The reckoning is only beginning
Matt Carlson Attacks on the press will get worse
Amie Ferris-Rotman More female reporters abroad (please)
Caitria O'Neill The new court of public opinion
Zizi Papacharissi Women come back
Errin Haines At the ballot, it’s time to count black women
Jared Newman Venture funding and digital news don’t mix
Rick Berke Value is the watchword
Niketa Patel Live journalism comes of age
Bill Keller A growing turn to philanthropy
Juleyka Lantigua-Williams Women of color will reclaim and monetize our time
Miguel Castro The arrival of the impact producer
Taylor Lorenz Social and media will split
Jassim Ahmad Thriving on change
Craig Newmark Working together toward sustainable solutions
Nicholas Quah Stop talking trash about young people
Valérie Bélair-Gagnon Seeking trust in fragmented spaces
Michelle Garcia Navigating journalistic transparency
Tanya Cordrey Finally, the seeds of radical reinvention
Nikki Usher The year of The Washington Post
Alice Antheaume Are you fluent in AI?
Adam Thomas Sharing is caring: The year of the mentor
Emma Carew Grovum Newsroom culture becomes a priority
Monika Bauerlein The firehose of falsehood
Lucas Graves From algorithms to institutions
S. Mitra Kalita The arc of news and audience
Ruth Palmer Risks will grow for news subjects — especially minorities
Alfred Hermida Going beyond mobile-first
Kristen Muller The year of the voter
Sarah Marshall Loyalty as the key performance indicator
Tanzina Vega It’s time for media companies to #PassTheMic
Marie Gilot No assholes allowed
Ray Soto VR reaches the next level
Matt DeRienzo A recession, then a collapse
Helen Havlak Keywords, not publishers, power the world’s biggest feeds
Hossein Derakhshan Television has won
Alastair Coote The year of self-improvement
Cristina Wilson The year of the Instagram Story
Raney Aronson-Rath Transparency is the antidote to fake news
Kyle Ellis Let’s build our way out of this
Caitlin Thompson Podcasting models mature and diversify
Juliette De Maeyer A responsible press criticism
Jim Moroney Newspapers have to be good enough for readers to pay for
Hannah Cassius The year of the echo-chamber escapists
Marcela Donini and Thiago Herdy Collaboration is the way forward for Brazilian journalism
Sam Sanders Shine the light on ourselves
Cindy Royal Your journalism curriculum is obsolete
Susie Banikarim R.I.P. Pivot to Video (2017–2017)
Sally Lehrman Trust comes first
Francesco Marconi The year of machine-to-machine journalism
Vivian Schiller Pivot to tomorrow
Julia Beizer A longer view on the pivot
Pia Frey Address users as individuals
Mike Caulfield Refactoring media literacy for the networked age
Elizabeth Jensen Show your work
Emily Goligoski Looking beyond news for inspiration
Sara M. Watson Feeds will open up to new user-determined filters
Brian Lam Sketchy ethics around product reviews
Federica Cherubini The rise of bridge roles in news organizations
Kinsey Wilson Facebook and Google: Help out or pay up
Tracie Powell The muting of underserved voices
An Xiao Mina Memes and visuals come to the fore
Raju Narisetti Mirror, mirror on the wall
José Zamora Revenue-first journalism
Daniel Trielli The rich get richer, the poor scramble
Feli Sánchez The year for guerrilla user research
Rachel Schallom Better design helps differentiate opinion and news
Michelle Ferrier The year of the great reckoning
Will Sommer The year local media gets conservative
Rodney Benson Better, less read, and less trusted
Laura E. Davis Writing answers before you know the question
Mira Lowe The year of the local watchdog
Joanne Lipman Journalists inventing revenue streams
Jessica Parker Gilbert Design connects storytelling and strategy
Julia B. Chan Looking for loyalty in all the right places
Rodney Gibbs Tech workers turn to journalism
Doris Truong Computer vision vs. the Internet vigilantes
Nicholas Diakopoulos Fortifying social media from automated inauthenticity
Lam Thuy Vo Breaking free from the tyranny of the loudest
Kim Fox Audience teams diversify their approach
Rasmus Kleis Nielsen The Snapchat scenario and the risk of more closed platforms
Cory Haik Suffering from realness, pivoting to impact
Damon Krukowski Reviving the alt-weekly soul
Dannagal G. Young Stop covering politics as a game
Umbreen Bhatti The trust problem isn’t new
Pete Brown Push alerts, personalized
Mandy Velez texting is lit rn, fam
Amy Webb Listen to weak signals
Luke O'Neil The end is already here
Kawandeep Virdee Zines had it right all along
Amy King Let’s amplify visual voice
Betsy O'Donovan and Melody Kramer Skepticism and narcissism
Jennifer Brandel and Mónica Guzmán The editorial meeting of the future
Carrie Brown-Smith Transparency finally takes off
Andrew Losowsky The year of resilience
Alan Soon The rise of start of psychographic, micro-targeted media
Mariano Blejman News games rule
David Skok Finding an information-life balance
Borja Echevarría TV goes digital, digital goes TV
Rubina Madan Fillion Unlocking the potential of AI
Mariana Moura Santos Think local, act global
Dan Shanoff You down with OTT? (Yeah, DTC)
Tim Carmody Watch out for Spotify