Credibility is fundamental to news media, without it journalism cannot exist.  In recent years many practitioners and researchers have proposed that a new norm, transparency, is changing the way journalism builds credibility. Moreover, it is also suggested that transparency actually improves journalistic credibility and that users will put greater trust in news media as a results of this shift in journalistic practice. Previous research on transparency has investigated journalists’ attitudes and news production settings as well as to what extent transparency is employed in the actual news contents. Although transparency is beginning to be explored on the production and content side, and often praised, no study so far have investigated if different forms of transparency have uniform, if any, effect on user perceptions. Thus, a vital link is missing in exploring if a movement towards a transparency norm is likely or even desirable.

In this study we try to address this, by employing a web-based experimental study to investigate if, and to what extent, different frequently used transparency techniques – such as corrections, timestamps and different forms of user-generated contributions – impinge on journalistic credibility. Consequently, the results will inform what, if any, forms of transparency that could be eligible in journalism practice.