● The two newsrooms sampled with the most number of policies available publicly were Makanday with 8 out of the 10 listed policies, and Diggers Newspaper with 7 policies published on its site. b. Recommendations News organisations should adopt newsroom policies and guidelines. To promote transparency, accountability and ethical journalism, media organisations must put in place clear newsroom policies and guidelines. This not only fosters trust in the media but also guards against media capture. In this regard, media owners should invest in the development of clear editorial policies, as well as provide the necessary resources to support quality journalism. Indeed news editors emphasised the importance of clear policies in ensuring editorial decisions are merit-based and devoid of external influences. Media houses should make ownership details and funding sources transparent. Vague ownership details can breed suspicion of external influence and the media organisation's agenda. To guard against such concerns and to uphold media freedom, media organisations should adopt clear policies that support full disclosure of funding sources. All staff should be trained on the editorial policies, where these are published, as well as how to declare their possible conflicts of interest. This analysis shows significant gaps in the publishing and accessibility of newsroom policies. It is recommended that MISA Zambia helps create an outline of best practice policies and templates, and works with newsrooms to adopt a standard. Newsroom adoption of artificial intelligence and adoption of guiding principles. Use of AI in newsrooms is relatively new, but already plays a role in newsroom operations. It is deployed in areas such as recommendation of stories to readers, text to speech, and identification of media to accompany stories. Other potential areas of AI include synthetic media creation such as automation of sports results, and financial market updates. However, this is happening without appropriate policies to guide the deployment of AI, or understanding the effect the technology is having in shaping the narrative. A lack of AI and synthetic media policy which guides the use of such tools exposes the media to influence from foreign actors and technology firms, which could come in the form of research, tools, training and financing to set up AI operations in the newsroom and so influence the news agenda. This report recommends the development of policies to guide AI use in news. 2. Background and context Zambia (population of approximately 18 million people) has a relatively diverse news media landscape with radio being the biggest news platform. MediaData has to date mapped 288 newsrooms across private, community, and state-owned media organisations. This research is an attempt to assess and understand the level of transparency of the country's media landscape by evaluating the availability and accessibility of newsroom editorial policies. Cite this report as: Mwale et al, 'Transparency and trust: newsroom policies in Zambia', African Data and Democracy Observatory, April 2023. . 3 3