Patrick Johnson, assistant professor of journalism at Marquette University, and ongoing research partner with Trusting News

Over the last decade, transparency has become one of journalism's guiding values. We've added author bios, sourcing explainers, corrections boxes, and behind-the-scenes reporting. These practices matter. They demonstrate to audiences that we are willing to show our work, not just present a polished story and ask for trust.

But as I've learned in my research and collaborations with newsrooms, transparency is not a destination. It is a practice. And the next frontier is clear: journalism must focus less on the product we deliver and more on the process we use to get there.

We call this metacognition, but that’s just a fancy way of saying that we must encourage more thinking about our thinking. Journalists must start spending more time and energy talking through how they do what they do and not just sharing the final product of what they did. Our newsrooms and our audiences deserve it.

This insight comes from a recent study I conducted with colleagues in eight US newsrooms. Over six weeks, journalists worked with........

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