Build a List of Rules for Your Newsroom
For the past three weeks, we have worked on media ethics. These are the rules you follow when you interact with sources of information and with people who your profile or cover.
Ethics guide us through a series of very hard choices that we have to make in the day-to-day world. They help us act with character and professionalism. They also protect us; they shield us from lawsuits and keep our newspapers, TV stations or websites in the legal clear.
What I want you to do today, as part of a group, is create a set of Ethics. Every major newsroom has one. As young journalists, your newsroom (this classroom) needs one too.
Building on the subjects we have discussed in class, write rules for the following:
1. Information -- What are your responsibilities with respect to the stories you write? Do you have rules that determine what you can print and what you won't print? What are those rules?
2. What standards do the facts in your stories have to meet?
Conflict of Interest
3. Who do you serve? Whose interests do you protect as a journalist? If there are several groups or organizations whom you serve, who gets priority?
The Public Interest
4. What stories are really important?
5. Which ones are "fun?"
6. Of the stories you mention in 4 and 5, which ares are fit to publish?
Sources
7. What do you owe your sources? If someone or a group come to you with important information, what do you owe their information and what do you owe these people?
8. Do you have a responsibility to tell them what you will do with their information and with their identity?
Subjects
9. Which news subjects are fair to cover and which ones are off limits? Where do you draw the line and why?
Privacy
Private Figures are sometimes newsworthy. When do you feel empowered to question and to report on people who are not in the public eye?
Public Figures are more newsworthy than private people. Politicians, celebrities, officials do not command the privacy you or I would. However, not all of their lives are fair game.
-- What parts of a public figures life are fair to cover?
-- What parts, if any, of a public figure's life are off-limits? Where do you draw the line?
Note: You can create this in groups. If you work in a small group or in a larger group, put all your names on the finished document. I encourage you to discuss these rules with each other and to create them together. They are the rules everybody in this class has agreed to follow.
Ethics guide us through a series of very hard choices that we have to make in the day-to-day world. They help us act with character and professionalism. They also protect us; they shield us from lawsuits and keep our newspapers, TV stations or websites in the legal clear.
What I want you to do today, as part of a group, is create a set of Ethics. Every major newsroom has one. As young journalists, your newsroom (this classroom) needs one too.
Building on the subjects we have discussed in class, write rules for the following:
1. Information -- What are your responsibilities with respect to the stories you write? Do you have rules that determine what you can print and what you won't print? What are those rules?
2. What standards do the facts in your stories have to meet?
Conflict of Interest
3. Who do you serve? Whose interests do you protect as a journalist? If there are several groups or organizations whom you serve, who gets priority?
The Public Interest
4. What stories are really important?
5. Which ones are "fun?"
6. Of the stories you mention in 4 and 5, which ares are fit to publish?
Sources
7. What do you owe your sources? If someone or a group come to you with important information, what do you owe their information and what do you owe these people?
8. Do you have a responsibility to tell them what you will do with their information and with their identity?
Subjects
9. Which news subjects are fair to cover and which ones are off limits? Where do you draw the line and why?
Privacy
Private Figures are sometimes newsworthy. When do you feel empowered to question and to report on people who are not in the public eye?
Public Figures are more newsworthy than private people. Politicians, celebrities, officials do not command the privacy you or I would. However, not all of their lives are fair game.
-- What parts of a public figures life are fair to cover?
-- What parts, if any, of a public figure's life are off-limits? Where do you draw the line?
Note: You can create this in groups. If you work in a small group or in a larger group, put all your names on the finished document. I encourage you to discuss these rules with each other and to create them together. They are the rules everybody in this class has agreed to follow.