Eighth International Conference on Communication & Media Studies

Abstract

The impact of transparency and data journalism has been widely discussed in the Western academic world. Transparency is seen as an effective way to address the crisis in traditional media journalism. However, the dark side of transparency may also bring new threats, for example, to journalism’s autonomy. Moreover, the demand for greater transparency may not only jeopardise journalism but may also lead to privacy violations and legal impediments. Therefore, transparency is not an absolutely positive concept, and the demand for transparency may lead to new threats that have not been investigated and studied in the Chinese context. Foucault’s concept of the Panopticon explains why transparency is not necessarily a positive concept, and that trust between the regulator and the regulated does not necessarily increase when there is more transparency. This study aims to understand whether Chinese readers’ trust in journalism is positively correlated with increased transparency or whether increased transparency has created new threats to journalism. Methodologically, the qualitative descriptive approach (QD) will be applied to understand the impacts of data journalism based on the data transparency. Furthermore, as a qualitative research method, semi-structured interviews will be used to investigate the perceptions of data journalism practitioners and readers on data transparency in China. This study is based on 10 industry insiders engaged in data journalism-related practices and 10 laypeople interested in data journalism participating in the interviews. The interviews were communicated in Chinese Mandarin, and then translated into English for research.