Where should transparency language go? In the story itself.
We talk a lot at Trusting News about transparency — the act of explaining how and why we do our work. But transparency only works if people notice it and find it interesting and persuasive, right? So, how do we know where to put transparency language? And how do we know if it has any impact?
Man, do we love it when researchers are interested in the same questions we are! To explore these topics, a team of researchers at the University of Georgia’s Digital Media and Cognition Lab in the journalism college conducted a study from 2021–2022.
What they learned suggests that journalists should weave transparency information into coverage instead of pulling it out into separate elements. That’s consistent with one of our basic strategies at Trusting News: Take advantage of attention where you have it. Anywhere your audience is learning about what you cover is an opportunity for them to learn about how you do your jobs. (Get some strategies and examples for transparency within stories in this Trust Kit.) And the more transparency language can be integrated, the better.
Read the whole research report here. And read what we suggest journalists do with their transparency elements in our Trust Tips newsletter.
The research team was led by Bart Wojdynski and Charlotte Norsworthy Varnum. We asked Varnum to tell us more about what the team learned.
How does your research work?
In the DMAC (dee-mac) Lab, we conduct research on how people view, understand and form impressions on digital media. This tends to range from studies on how people perceive advertisements to what users notice about their Instagram feeds. Of course, a big portion of our research includes news media and how audiences engage with material on desktop and on mobile devices. In this study and many like it, we use an eye-tracking software that digitally maps out where users direct their visual attention. This specific method allows us to manipulate different content presentations and examine whether there were any differences in what attracted the most amount of attention. In combination with eye-tracking methods, we also will prompt users to, say, read an article as they normally would. From there, we typically follow up tasks like these with a series of questions about what they noticed and whether that impacted their perceptions.
What did you ask participants to do in this study?
As many media professionals know, trust in news has been declining globally for years. Many news organizations are wondering what methods they might employ to improve feelings of trust and credibility, and many research studies suggest that increasing transparency might be the way forward. Offering readers a look into the process for how and why journalists reported a story can actively counter feelings of mistrust, and research shows that audiences can really value this insight into the journalistic process.
In this study, we were most interested in exploring the effectiveness of what we call “transparency boxes” on perceptions of credibility. These boxes are often used in online publications to visually separate out a brief explainer on how or why the news organization reported on this story. However, in order to be effective, transparency boxes must be noticed by audiences. A recent experiment found that the addition of transparency-related elements to an online news article did lead to increased perceptions of article credibility, but that many users did not see the elements.
So, that is where we started our study. We wanted to understand how the design of these boxes might influence whether users see the box and whether that impacted how they felt about the journalism.
Specifically, these were our research questions:
- Do audiences notice transparency boxes?
- For those who do notice transparency boxes, does that influence their feelings of credibility?
We identified two news articles in which to manipulate their existing transparency boxes. One was a 2019 news article from The State, a daily newspaper based in Columbia, SC, titled “Student dies in USC Greek Village, president confirms. Authorities investigating.” The story covers the death of a University of South Carolina student and the subsequent response from the university community. The second article is a 2019 news article from The San Francisco Chronicle, also a daily newspaper, titled “Losing Summer: 10 months. Nearly 30 visits to San Francisco’s psychiatric ER. And a suicide.” The article tells the story of a woman named Summer, her interactions with the health care system, and her declining mental health before she committed suicide.
Both stories explained the news organization’s policies surrounding reporting on suicide, which is generally something that is avoided unless it is particularly newsworthy. Most journalism standards include an entry on “avoiding harm” in reporting, and these policies often stem from these standards. As such, we felt these stories were appropriate examples of when transparency boxes would be used.
From there, we designed a variety of presentations for the transparency boxes — four to be exact.
- We designed an option known as “high contrast” where we used stand-out colors as a way to attract attention.
- We also designed a floating box in the margins of the page that followed users as they scrolled.
- We then used the standard design that these news organizations used: a simple gray box with type within.
- Finally, we had a “no box” version, where the explainer text was incorporated into the body of the article.
We then embedded the boxes into the articles and asked each participant to read each of the two articles. We followed up their readings with questions, and what we learned was interesting.
What did you learn? And what do you still want to learn?
Based on our research questions, we had some interesting results from the study. Whether users noticed the boxes was varied, but our results did show that users were nearly four times more likely to notice the “no box” and “high contrast” transparency box designs. Meaning, the stand-out color way of the high contrast box definitely got some eyeballs, as did the “box” that was simply integrated into the body copy of the article.
From there, we wanted to learn whether those who noticed the box had greater feelings of credibility toward the news they were reading. We learned that viewers of the box were more likely to believe that the article was reported ethically and that the news organization could be trusted to ethically report on suicide in the future. Though I will note, those feelings of increased trust were not much higher than those who did not read the contents of the transparency boxes. It’s also clear from our results that users spent the most amount of time reading the “no box” design. There are many potential reasons for why that is, but a likely thought is that users were simply reading the article as instructed for the study and naturally assumed that information to be equal parts of the story just like every other paragraph.
This is an interesting idea because as advertisements, video thumbnails and catchy headlines have increasingly gotten flashier as a means to grab attention, research is showing that users have learned these tricks and naturally start avoiding any highly visually-deviant item online that might mimic an ad. As such, we noticed a lot of users skipping over boxes that felt supplemental or not part of the original story. This not only inspired some potential recommendations to journalism practitioners (more on that next) but also identified some areas of research that can be explored going forward.
Often explanations about the reporting process are treated as supplemental pieces of information via a sidebar or, in this case, a transparency box. However, these results show that there might be something to the idea behind utilizing audience attention where you already have it.
As journalists work transparency into their coverage, what does this research mean they should keep in mind?
There were a couple things we knew going into this study from the perspective of media professionals. One is that visual attention is a challenge. Not only is it a commodity, one that can be marketed for financial gain (i.e. advertisers love eyeballs!), but it also is a metric for whether any one piece of journalism is reaching its desired audience. But perhaps a greater challenge we knew, both from the media side and the research side, is that there is no clear answer to what builds and breaks feelings of trust and credibility. These feelings are complicated and certainly not something we could significantly shape over the course of a single study. Regardless, we think this study contributed to the overall knowledge-base of how credibility might be improved through journalistic transparency processes.
Based on these outcomes from our study, I think there is a lot for news organizations to learn when it comes to approaches to transparency. Often explanations about the reporting process are treated as supplemental pieces of information via a sidebar or, in this case, a transparency box. However, these results show that there might be something to the idea behind utilizing audience attention where you already have it.
If audiences are reading the article, perhaps fold reporter process and organizational policy descriptions into the story where it’s relevant to mention them. This way it is built into the story itself and readers are less likely to miss it or avoid it entirely. Taking off my researcher hat and putting on my journalist hat, the process of weaving transparency practices into your journalism also, in my opinion, contributes to normalizing transparency as a journalistic practice. We demand transparency from our sources, it would naturally make sense to be transparent with our readers about our methods and standards.
At Trusting News, we learn how people decide what news to trust and turn that knowledge into actionable strategies for journalists. We train and empower journalists to take responsibility for demonstrating credibility and actively earning trust through transparency and engagement. We’re co-hosted by the Reynolds Journalism Institute and the American Press Institute. Subscribe to our Trust Tips newsletter. Follow us on Twitter and Facebook. Read more about our work at TrustingNews.org.
