Transparency as a key element of data journalism Perceptions of Brazilian professionals Marília Gehrke Postgraduate Program in Communication Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil marilia.gehrke@ufrgs.br ABSTRACT In recent years, especially because of disinformation, transparency has been an important part of journalists’ work. Transparent conduct involves opening methods and procedures of reporting. It means, overall, showing the audience how the information was obtained and verified until being published. This study aims to unravel Brazilian data journalists’ perceptions of transparency. In order to do so, it presents the results of a survey with 36 professionals in 2019. Most of them are data journalists that work in newsrooms for more than ten years. A significant part of the respondents believes that transparency must be shown every day to the readers. Among the main reasons to rely on transparency as an important value in their practice is the necessity to increase credibility in journalism and combat disinformation. Furthermore, this research suggests that transparency seems to be connected to objectivity and journalists’ ethics, but not necessarily to the news outlets’ rules. KEYWORDS Data journalism. Transparency. Credibility. Disinformation. Reference: Marília Gehrke. 2020. Transparency as a key element of data journalism: perceptions of Brazilian professionals. In Computation + Journalism Symposium 2020. Boston, MA, USA, 5 pages. 1. Introduction Transparency is an important journalistic value to combat disinformation and increase news outlets’ credibility. It is understood as a method to disclose news reporting processes, which means showing the audience how the information was collected and how far an investigation could be developed [7] [10] [19]. Data journalism is under development in Brazil. Through the Access of Information Law – which came into force in May 2012 and was based on examples such as the American Freedom of Information Act –, more information became publicly available online. It has contributed to data journalism’ expansion in Brazil – there are 52 news organizations practicing it [16]. Unfortunately, the growth occurs in a period in which trust in news media has decreased. According to the Digital News Report 2019 [13], trust in media has fallen 11 percentage points in Brazil compared to the year before. The last presidential elections, in October 2018, was extremely polarized and the use of social media contributed to the spread of disinformation. Although it is hard to correlate the impact of disinformation with the elections’ results, the far-right President newly elected Jair Bolsonaro certainly had influenced – and still influence – the population when he calls credible news media organizations “fake news” and offends journalists. Such as President Donald Trump in the US, he adopts a post-truth communication to create and share his own “facts” [20]. In this landscape, it seems to make sense to study transparency’s importance in data journalism. It is a way for to journalists defend their own work while explaining to the readers why some stories were developed and how the information was obtained (sources’ provenance). Transparency implies honesty. This paper aims to understand how Brazilian data journalists perceive transparency. In order to do so, it presents the results of an online survey with 36 professionals. The people surveyed provided information about their procedures, strategies and perceptions regarding transparency in journalism. These preliminary results indicate that they believe data journalism has advantages on showing transparency, and this set of procedures may be closer to objectivity. Among the main reasons to rely on transparency as an important value in their practice is the necessity to increase credibility in journalism and to combat disinformation. Furthermore, this study suggests transparency seems to be connected to journalists’ ethics, not necessarily the news organizations’ rules. The group of journalists who filled the survey also said that transparency should be demonstrated every day, not only in special reporting. 2. Data journalism in Brazil Data journalism is a term relatively new, brought up in the middle of the 2000s, and frequently referred to Adrian Holovaty’s text about how newspapers should change. He basically defended that journalists should think about the use and reuse of information, and not only gather it for one specific story. Data journalism has predecessors such as Precision Journalism and Computer-Assisted Reporting (CAR). Open data policies around the world contributed to data journalism widespread particularly since the end of the 2000s. In Brazil, the Access of Information Law – popularly known as LAI, short for Lei de Acesso à Informação in Portuguese – induced a frequent use of data in newsrooms. In the past years, databases and spreadsheets have become popular and governments from different countries started to provide public information online. Scientists, bloggers, developers, and journalists have demonstrated interest in generating knowledge through that. Bradshaw [3] defines data as the “information that