The level of scrutiny of journalism from the public and outside entities is greater than ever before, and this requires news organizations to think of new ways to build trust, make their work stand out, and open the door to greater interaction with the audience. New digital platforms offer a wealth of options to ensure transparency and credibility.

The question, as always, is what best practices should you apply, and what innovative things are newsrooms doing?

With that in mind. I’m excited to share that I am working with the American Press Institute to research and publish a free Strategy Study that will capture best practices and offer actionable guidance for newsrooms related to corrections, transparency and credibility in the digital age.

In the spirit of transparency and collaboration, I want to ask for your help and participation. Below is a list of the main areas of focus for this study. If you have examples, experiences, advice or other useful information to share in one or several of these areas, I want to hear from you. Drop me an email with your thoughts and hopefully we can talk more. You can also leave a comment below, or tweet me @craigsilverman.

At the same time, if you know of people and newsrooms doing interesting and innovative work in these areas, I want to hear about them. Please share the details and I will follow up.

You can expect to see the final study published later this summer.

Areas of Focus

Showing your work

• Incorporating source materials into reporting.
• Sharing information while in the process of reporting.
• Showing changes/edits to content.

Transparent collaboration with the audience

• Crediting readers for spotting errors or offering new information.
• Innovative correction/error reporting tools and workflows.
• New ways of doing letters, soliciting and incorporating comments, responding to criticism.

Curation and attribution

• Adding value to the content.
• Crediting others.
• Using/citing social media content in an ethical way.

Disclosures and statements of values

• What to disclose.
• New ways to display disclosures.

Doing digital corrections

• Creating a corrections workflow.
• Writing effective corrections.
• Spreading corrections on social media.