Transparency has been emphasized as a new norm within journalism and has received a great deal of attention. The credo of transparency is openness, and the interactive potential of digital media has been identified as one key element in achieving openness. In this essay it is argued that by exposing previously hidden journalistic processes, the high speed of online news plays a part in this orientation towards transparency in journalism.

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PreprintThis is the submitted version of a paper published in Journalism Studies. Citation for the original published paper (version of record):Karlsson, M., Clerwall, C., Nord, L. (2014) You ain´t seen nothing yet.: Transparency' s (lack of ) Effect on Source and Message Credibility. AbstractTransparency has been proposed to both change the way journalism is being produced and increase its credibility. However, little research has been conducted to assess the connection between transparency and credibility. This study utilizes an experimental setting (N=1320) to measure what impact transparency have on source and message credibility from the user perspective. The results reveals an almost absence of any transparency effect on both source and message credibility although some small significant effects could be observed primarily regarding internal hyperlinks, comments and contextual information. Although further research is desperately needed in this area the study suggest that transparency does not affect the credibility of journalism in the eyes of the contemporary audience and thus have limited appeal as a new norm in journalism.

According to previous research, two characteristics of online news as opposed to traditional news are interactivity and immediacy. However, most research in this area has focused on the news site-level of analysis, and there are only a few studies on how interactivity and immediacy affect online news on the news story-level of analysis. The main reason for this appears to be that the very nature of online news makes observation by traditional research methods, such as quantitative content analysis, problematic. Against this background, the overall purpose of this paper is to explore methodological approaches for the study of interactivity and immediacy on the news story-level of online news. The paper develops a three-pronged strategy for freezing the flow of online news to enable systematic content analyses of interactivity and immediacy, and tests this strategy in a comparative analysis of the online news sites Guardian.co.uk in Britain and Aftonbladet.se in Sweden.