When Journalists Tweet: Disclosure, Participatory, and Personal Transparency

This article analyses transparency among groups of journalists by examining journalists' tweets. It also answers a call from previous researchers on transparency on Twitter for further studies based on more representative samples of journalists. The study draws on a quantitative content analysis of Swedish journalists' tweets during 1 week in spring 2014. The total number of tweets analyzed (N) is 1,500. A total of 24% of the journalists' tweets can be described as being explicitly transparent. However, the findings indicate that while journalists on Twitter indeed discuss how the news are produced (disclosure transparency), they show less personal transparency, and hardly ever invite the audiences to interact or take part in the process of making news (participatory transparency).