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To Disclose or Not to Disclose: A Comprehensive Analysis Into the Article Transparency of News Websites

Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: An increasing part of the public is distrustful toward journalism. Transparency has been advocated to counter this trend. Therefore, the question arises to what extent news outlets have implemented transparency. General content analyses of the implementation of transparency routines are scarce. We try to add to the literature by conducting a generic quantitative content analysis on the prevalence of a diverse set of transparency routines over multiple news outlets. We also assessed whether transparency not only differs between outlets but also within outlets; namely, between hard vs. soft news section items. We hypothesized that digital-native, public, and quality news outlets and hard news section items would be relatively more transparent. After analyzing 27,096 news items from six news outlets, we find that the outlets differed in the extent to which and areas in which they had implemented transparency: (a) The digital-native news outlet was more transparent than legacy news outlets, except for author transparency, (b) the public news outlet was more transparent in terms of news updates and source use compared to commercial news outlets, but less so in terms of authors and production processes, (c) no substantial systematic differences were found in the extent of transparency implementation between quality and popular news outlets, and (d) hard news section items were only more transparent in source use than in soft news section items. As being one of the only generic quantitative content analyses, this study has contributed to our understanding of the different patterns across news outlets in transparency implementation.
DOI: 10.1177/10776990241306411
Language: English
Subfield: Communication
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $3,900
OpenAlex ID: W4406796504
FWCI: 13.36
Cites: 64
Cited by: 7
Related to: 10