KU researcher leading project to gauge effectiveness of journalism ethics disclosures

LAWRENCE — In an era of low trust in news media, little things to build trust in journalists’ ethics training may help build confidence and support their credibility. A University of Kansas researcher is helping lead a study to determine what effects sharing a journalist’s ethics training may have on reader perceptions.

Alyssa Appelman, associate professor of journalism & mass communications at KU, and Kirstie Hettinga of California Lutheran University have received grant funding from the Arthur W. Page Center at Pennsylvania State University to conduct the study “Transparency effects: Audience perceptions of journalists’ ethics training disclosure.” The study will look at whether disclosing a journalist’s ethics training affects reader perceptions of their credibility, and if so, how. The team is collaborating on the project with Trusting News, an organization that provides support for journalists.

Appelman and Hettinga, both former copy editors, conduct research into transparency in journalism and trust that audiences have in journalism.

“We've done some studies looking at journalists’ efforts to be transparent to their readers, to see if that's a way for them to build credibility and trust,” Appelman said. “If journalists are more open about what they're doing and how they're doing it, will that increase trust from readers? Will readers be able to better understand what a professional journalist is doing and what they're bringing to the table in terms of their background and their experience?”

The team will conduct a series of online experiments in which they present readers with news that contains various kinds of disclosures about what type of ethics training a journalist has had. Subjects will read news stories, and the researchers will gauge their reactions to the disclosures. These disclosures will be in the format of what Trusting News calls “mission statements,” which expands on the notion of biographies to further explain the journalist’s goals and purpose.

“What we're interested in is, if you included in the mission statement what kind of ethics training a person had, would that help? Would readers even notice it? Are readers looking at the mission statements? If they do, would they notice the ethics training listed? And if they did, would that help? So, we're looking at sort of that overlap of noticing, paying attention, and does it affect their credibility perceptions,” Appelman said.

Appelman and Hettinga will also examine if mission statements regarding ethics training make a difference in different types of news contexts, such as feature stories and hard news, as well as whether the effects vary based on different types of training and who has received them. For example, they’re interested in whether readers’ responses differ if a new journalist had ethics trainings as part of their college education or if a veteran journalist had recently taken part in an ethics workshop.

Previous research exploring corrections of mistakes has found people often don’t notice them, even when it is noted that a previous version of a story contained a mistake.

“We've done a lot of different analyses of corrections, what kind of mistakes tend to be corrected, and what we found is that people don't always notice the corrections. And in other studies, people do say news organizations that correct their mistakes are more credible,” Appelman said. “They'll say that that feature helps, but they don't always notice the corrections. So, part of what we're looking for in this initial study, too, is, are readers noticing these kind of mission statements? Are they reading them? Are some people reading them more than others?”

The grant is part of the Page/Johnson Legacy Scholar Grant Program, which is funding research projects across the country to examine questions in journalism, public relations, advertising and strategic communication in questions of ethics, scholar/practitioner collaborations and theory for integrity in public relations. Appelman, whose body of research explores the psychological effects of journalistic practices, said the findings will both help practicing journalists and their outlets determine more effective approaches to disclosure of ethics training and will help journalism programs train future professionals in practices that are effective and help build audience trust.