Background
To combat declining trust in news in the United States, numerous tools have been created to increase transparency by providing contextual information around news content, but they have largely been developed without regard for usability. Research indicates that transparency, engagement, and racial and ideological diversity in the newsroom are important factors in influencing trust in news. In particular, 71% of Americans deem news publishers' commitment to transparency "very important" when making trust determinations. Tools designed to provide transparency around different aspects of the journalistic process have emerged recently, with some focused on sharing supporting documents, fact-checking claims in articles, and identifying potential misinformation on social media.
According to Michael Karlsson, a prominent scholar in the field of media and communication, there are three types of transparency that can be applied to news content. The first of these is disclosure transparency, which addresses how and why news is being made. The second is participatory transparency which invites non-journalists to engage in various parts of the news production process (e.g., commenting or sending in images of events). The third is ambient transparency, which includes the display of information near news content to support news consumers in evaluating and forming new meanings around that content. For example, adding hyperlinks, journalists’ personal opinions, or labels indicating whether a news story is considered opinion or news are all ways to provide ambient transparency.
In this project, we will examine several tools to identify the type(s) of transparency (disclosure, participatory, or ambient) information each tool aims to provide. The project team will also conduct a heuristic usability analysis of a subset of these transparency tools and identify common usability barriers.
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