Duration: October 2026 – September 2029
PIs: Dr. Lars-Ole Wehden (University of Münster) & Dr. Bernadette Uth (University of Vienna)
Funding: DFG (Deutschland) & FWF (Österreich)
Grant Amount: 643,848 euros (total funding), of which 403,940 euros are for the German portion of the project (DFG)
Transparency is regularly discussed as the new central standard of journalism. While the goal of objectivity dominated for a long time, newsrooms have increasingly focused in recent years on openly communicating behind-the-scenes processes—for example, by providing background information on reporters or on the news selection process.
The call for greater transparency is often linked to the hope of fostering greater trust among the public. In recent years, the trustworthiness of journalism has increasingly become a topic of public debate. In both practice and research, journalists and scholars often view transparency as a key component in building trust.
An important way in which journalists make their work transparent is by citing the sources they use for their reporting. Recently, a new form of this source transparency has emerged in Germany and Austria: the use of scholarly citations in the form of footnotes, for example, at the bottom of journalistic articles or as on-screen captions in news videos. The term “footnote journalism” was coined to describe this type of source transparency.
However, such new ways of working and the accompanying new norms break with the experiences and expectations that the public has of journalism. Before such innovations can strengthen the relationship between journalism and the public and foster trust, they must therefore likely first undergo a process of familiarization and normalization before they can ultimately gain acceptance.
The project aims to analyze precisely this process and examines how new journalistic practices—using footnote journalism as an example—are internalized and normalized by journalists and their audiences.
To answer these questions, several sub-studies involving journalists and members of the public will be conducted in Germany and Austria. To shed light on the journalistic side, a survey of journalists in both countries on their routines, motivations, and hopes is planned, using guided interviews. To analyze the normalization of new journalistic practices by the audience over time, qualitative interviews and an experimental survey will be conducted at several time points, during which participants will be exposed to various forms of footnote journalism. Finally, eye-tracking will be used to analyze how source transparency should be designed to increase its acceptance by the audience.
The project makes an important contribution to research on a new form of source transparency and also provides insight into how new journalistic standards and practices are established and accepted both within journalism and by the public.