Just 40 per cent of people trust the news, according to the Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2025. That’s not just a statistic, it’s an existential threat. For decades, journalism responded to trust crises with its claim to be objective, but it’s clear that approach no longer cuts it.

This isn’t just about misinformation or declining revenues. We’ve moved from information scarcity to attention scarcity, fundamentally changing the game.

Journalism now competes with influencers, state actors, activists, and AI-generated content all fighting for the same attention. The danger is the imitation game: competitors copy journalistic formats without adopting journalistic standards.

To audiences, a person with a microphone asking questions looks the same whether they’re bound by editorial standards or not. If we want the audience to know we are different, we have to show and tell.

So the solution isn’t better PR or production values. It’s radical transparency about how we work - and that necessitates a new, dedicated newsroom position. The transparency editor.

Radical transparency is not rocket science. It simply means showing your workings. It means revealing your process and letting readers judge your reasoning. Transparency consists of three main pillars: story, maker, and public.

The Story pillar involves process transparency: things like explaining how you reported, how much time it took to get the........

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