A collaboration of Pen America and The Trust Project, Newsroom Transparency Tracker is a tool that reveals the policies, practices, and people behind the news. The need for information and transparency in the newsroom has never been more prevalent and NTT is the premier resource for just that.
The Newsroom Transparency Tracker, a collaboration between PEN America and The Trust Project, reveals the policies, practices and people behind the news. The challenge was to turn a serious, information-heavy accountability project into a tool people can actually use. The underlying data covers many news outlets across many attributes, which could easily become an unreadable spreadsheet. It also had to stay credible and neutral, since the project makes judgments about newsrooms visible to the public.
We built the Tracker as a usable resource, not a report. The data is organized around four Trust Indicators: best practices, journalist expertise, type of work and diverse voices. Each is color coded and explained before a visitor ever reaches the table. The tracker itself is a searchable grid of newsrooms, with a simple legend showing whether each outlet fully, partially or does not publish a given policy. An FAQ answers the inevitable questions about method. The interface stays plain and impartial, in keeping with its backers.
A genuinely usable public resource. Readers and journalists can look up a newsroom and understand its transparency at a glance, or compare outlets side by side. A dense research dataset became something a member of the public can explore in a minute, on a laptop or a phone, which gives the project's mission a practical, everyday form. The design keeps its opinions out of the way, so the data can speak for itself.
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