Joe Think: Tales about relevance, context, storytelling, and local journalism

It took me about a year to turn “transparency” from a word with nasty connotations to a word with positive ones. The internet gives a great new landscape for transparency. Here are a few places newspapers could start:

1. Create an index of your corrections that include the correction made and a link to the original article (like the Washington Post, or the Albany Times-Union, Raleigh News-Observer, Rocky Mountain News, Wall Street Journal, Seattle Times, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Reuters, and Christian Science Monitor)
2. Start an editor’s blog, or ombudsman blog, or some blog written by somebody with the authority to write about the decisions the paper makes.
3. Write a guide to your content — online and off. Your readers don’t know and understand your product the same way you do: that’s a gap. A guide helps bridge that gap.
4. Provide a public place for readers to ask questions about news judgment, and a public place that people from the newspaper respond.
5. Give meaningful background on the people writing your articles. Tell the reader what potential ethics conflicts the authors have. Anonymous-but-for-bylines does not inspire trust. The Wall Street Journal did just that on their tech blog: author bios and author ethics statements.

I don’t think many newsrooms have much to hide — but I don’t think readers really get that. The more information newsrooms make available about who they are, what they do and why, the less room there is for faulty thinking. A see-through newsroom can only help.