Reflecting, Regulating, Adapting: Metacognition’s Role in Journalism Practices

This article advances our understanding of transparency in journalism through the lens of metacognition. Drawing on a six-week intervention with eight U.S. newsrooms, the study analyzes journalists’ reflective journals using the Eight Pillars of Metacognition and a three-stage interpretive method. Findings reveal that journalists used metacognitive strategies—such as self-monitoring, adaptation, discrimination, and mnemosyne—to question assumptions, revise workflows, and embed transparency into daily practice. Rather than treating transparency as a discrete output or static ideal, this study positions it as a situated epistemic practice that unfolds through internal reflection, institutional memory, and relational ethics. While existing scholarship critiques transparency’s limited impact on public trust, this article argues that its unrealized potential lies in how it is practiced and internalized. Metacognition offers a conceptual bridge between normative ideals and newsroom work’s messy, iterative realities. This reorientation from transparency-as-disclosure to transparency-as-reflection highlights the cognitive labor journalists perform to remain accountable in uncertain and constrained environments. The study contributes to journalism studies by theorizing metacognition as both a professional resource and a democratic imperative that equips journalists to navigate audience skepticism, institutional pressures, and the evolving demands of ethical practice.