Let’s talk about transparency.

As I am writing this, I am in the middle of writing an article about research I did in Cameroon and Sierra Leone last year. It’s about palm oil, and part of a series about the Belgian company Socfin’s operations in West Africa.

The Guardian published an 800-word feature on it, “The palm oil company at the centre of a bitter land rights struggle in Cameroon.” It was a pleasure working with the editorial team of the publication’s Sustainable Business page, and the outcome was a well-edited piece on what’s going on around that palm oil plantation in Cameroon.

However, having spent a month in the rural areas of that West African country, I learned about the artisanal milling process and the importance of palm oil for indigenous peoples; I met with company officials, scholars and NGOs; I got hold of contracts, maps and other relevant documents. Then I came back to spend hours reviewing my material and other reports published around the topic.

In Cameroon, I didn’t arrive and go straight to the place to do the story. When I arrived, I wasn’t even sure what story we would end up with, in part because we didn’t know what was awaiting us. I was with photographer Dylan Collins. How could we, two Westerners, have known what’s really going on in the middle of the Congo Basin, where oil palms have been planted for centuries and where a big European investor has taken over a huge plantation? All we knew was what we had read in NGO reports.

So we navigated our way through this story with the help of people — locals, who helped us understand what’s going on and who opened their houses for us.

Most of these people never show up in a story. Nor do all the research documents we’ve gathered, or the little bits and pieces that together made the research complete and let us create this 800-word feature for The Guardian.

It left me a bit frustrated at the time. Here I had all this, what I still believe, incredibly valuable material, but little of it was published. There is no space for stuff like that in an 800-word feature.

And rightfully so, as it would distract the reader from the storyline and can be quite disturbing.

While our story was truthful, it was not the full picture, even with the beautiful photo line that was added.

These days, a lot is said about trust and transparency in our current media landscape, and it seems like both are in a poor state.

There is an overflow of information; we hear and see so much from everywhere and always wonder about the “truth.” What is truth? No one knows.

But there is the notion that every edited article — as “truthful” as it might be — is not entirely truthful. Because it doesn’t show what the ingredients to it were. I know, of course, as the writer. I’ve been in the field, I’ve smelled the Cameroonian forest after the first rain of the season. I’ve heard the birds squawk happily in the mango tree. I’ve ridden on the back of a motorbike from plantation to plantation to plantation, I’ve read the contracts, the documents and reports, and met many different people who eventually let me accumulate the knowledge to write my article for The Guardian.

And that’s my job as a journalist, a job I love.

After having pondered how to make journalism more “organic” by creating a platform for raw material and social media from my colleagues and friends in the Middle East, the idea is evolving into something more general.

Something that is not necessarily limited to the Middle East, but serves to provide more transparency in long form / in-depth journalism in the world.

So this is what I am thinking about now: how can we create trust? By making our reporting, and the ingredients of our stories, more transparent.

This is what I am working on right now.

Stay tuned.