Community
- Respect your audience and those you write about. Consider how your work and its permanence may affect the subjects of your reporting, your community and, since the Internet knows no boundaries, the larger world.
Telling the truth
- Be honest, accurate, truthful and fair. Do not distort or fabricate facts, imagery, sound or data.
- Provide accurate context for all reporting.
- Seek out diverse voices that can contribute important perspectives on the subject you’re writing.
- Ensure that sources are reliable. To the maximum extent possible, make clear to your audience who and what your sources are, what motivations your sources may have and any conditions people have set for giving you information. When unsure of information, leave it out or make clear it has not been corroborated.
- Correct errors quickly, completely and visibly. Make it easy for your audience to bring errors to your attention.
- If a report includes criticism of people or organizations, give them the opportunity to respond.
- Clearly distinguish fact from opinion in all content.
Conflicts of interest
- Avoid any conflict of interest that undermines your ability to report fairly. Disclose to your audience any unavoidable conflicts or other situational factors that may validly affect their judgment of your credibility.
- Do not allow people to make you dishonestly skew your reporting. Do not offer to skew your reporting under any circumstances.
- Do not allow the interests of advertisers or others funding your work to affect the integrity of your journalism.
Professional Conduct
- Don’t plagiarize or violate copyrights.
- Keep promises to sources, readers and the community.
- Give all staff expectations, support and tools to maintain ethical standards.
Concealing Identity
- We permit undercover reporting only when we feel a story is important enough to justify doing so, and we have exhausted all other reasonable methods.
Confidential Sources
- We use confidential sources sparingly to provide important information that cannot be obtained through on-the-record sources. Reporters should disclose the identity of unnamed sources to at least one editor.
- We will disclose to readers or viewers the reasons for granting confidentiality, such as fear for the source’s safety or job, when we use unnamed sources.
- We are more open to granting confidentiality to sources we approach for interviews than to sources approaching us with tips or with dirt about political opponents or business rivals.
- We always assume that government snoops, law enforcement or hackers might access our regular communication channels when we grant confidentiality to a source. We should use technology such as encryption software or “burner” cell phones to protect confidentiality.
Children: Coverage, Images and Interviews
- We avoid identifying — by name or photo — children who are connected with a crime as perpetrators, victims or witnesses.
- We consider granting confidentiality if we’re covering a story about a sensitive issue that could cause a child to be stereotyped, judged unfairly or put in harm’s way, even if the child doesn’t request it.
Interviewing
- Our organization never pays for interviews.
- Our organization will provide interview subjects with a general idea of our questions in advance.
- Articles and reports must state the method of interviewing (i.e., whether it was in person, by telephone, video, Skype or email) regardless of the situation or context.
Sources: Reliability and Attribution
- We disclose how sources In “ordinary people” stories were identified (e.g. through Twitter).
- We include source attribution in online stories themselves as well as links, if available, that provide additional information.
Accuracy
- Our staff members must take responsibility for the accuracy of all information that we publish, using an accuracy checklist before publication.
- If we are unsure of the accuracy of information, we should cite our sources, word stories carefully to avoid spreading false rumors, acknowledge what we don’t know and ask the community’s help in confirming or correcting our information.
- Reporters should fact-check before publication but should not preview any of the actual text of a story with sources.
Balance and Fairness
- To ensure fairness, we believe in covering not only the most powerful voices on an issue, but also those who are not normally heard (e.g. in election coverage, mainstream and non-mainstream candidates).
- We will refrain from presenting multiple points of view if one perspective on an issue has been credibly established as fact. In other words, we will avoid “false balance.”
- In breaking news situations, we will attempt to gather comments from key sides of an issue; if comments are not immediately available, we will publish or air the story without them, make clear that we were unable to get some comment and update our story as needed.
Quotations
- We will clean up random utterances such as pauses, “um” or “you know” unless they materially alter the meaning.
- We will correct grammatical errors by sources unless they are people in positions of power (e.g., elected officials or public figures).
- We will allow separate phrases of a quote separated by ellipsis. (“I will go to war … but only if necessary,” the president said.)
- We will allow separate phrases of a quote separated by attribution. (“I will go to war,” the president said. “But only if necessary.”)
Withholding Names
- Unless we have a compelling reason to withhold a name, we always publish names of people involved in the stories we cover.
- We do not publish names of sexual assault victims unless they agree to speak on the record.
- We will consider potential harm to sources facing intolerance in their societies before naming them in stories.
Financial Interests
- Our journalists should immediately disclose to a supervisor any interests they have in a company they are asked to cover. Supervisors should consider putting another journalist on the story.
- Our journalists must disclose their financial interests to their supervisors.
Community Activities
- Our journalists are encouraged to be involved in the community and the issues we cover, but we will disclose these involvements in our coverage.
Gifts, Free Travel and Other Perks
- Our journalists should disclose any gifts they receive to their supervisors and discuss whether something needs to be returned, disclosed, paid for, donated to charity or handled in some other way that protects our integrity.
- Our journalists who travel internationally should use good judgment to determine if upholding our gift policy would be culturally insensitive. If a journalist accepts a gift that normally would violate our ethics, we should disclose the gift and/or donate it to charity.
- Our journalists may accept a small gift in cases where people are being kind and clearly not trying to influence us. Our gift policy does not require us to be rude; sometimes there’s a common-sense need to accept a small gift.
- Our journalists may accept tickets or press passes to events we are covering or reviewing.
Plagiarism and Attribution
- We must always attribute all sources by name and, if the source is digital, by linking to the original source.
- When we are using someone else’s exact words, we should use quotation marks and attribution.
- Attribution should be as specific as possible, including the name of the author and publication or organization of the source we are quoting.
- We should always cite news releases if they are our sources, and should quote them if using their exact words.
Political Activities by Staff
- We encourage our journalists to be involved in the community, politics and the issues we cover, but we will disclose these involvements in our coverage.
- Our journalists should disclose community and political involvements, particularly those involving topics they might cover, both in general statements we will publish on our website and in stories relating to their involvement.
Social Networks
- Our journalists are free to express opinions on social media.
- We encourage staff members to retweet, reblog, share and otherwise pass along things they find interesting on social media. We trust them to provide context where appropriate.
- Staff members should always identify themselves in social media profiles, and, if they are using the profile for professional purposes, they should identify themselves as working for our organization.
- A staff member who considers not identifying himself or herself accurately in a social media profile should explain the extraordinary circumstances to a top editor and receive approval before starting such an account.
- We should edit or delete inaccurate social media posts, so people who haven’t seen the corrections will not spread them on social media. We should note that we have edited or deleted inaccurate posts.
- We should note who has retweeted, liked or otherwise shared inaccurate social media posts that we are correcting, and attempt to message them directly to call attention to our corrections.
Corrections
- If a mistake is made in a social media post, we will delete the original post and publish a corrected version with an indication that the new post is a correction.
- We will show all corrections in the place the incorrect material originally appeared (e.g., put corrections related to a story at the bottom of that same story).
Handling and protection of freelancers and “fixers”
- We will publicly credit the work of freelancers, fixers and translators unless doing so poses risk of harm, such as threatening a person’s safety.
- We will pay reasonable fees to freelancers, fixers and translators for their services but not for contributing as sources on a story.
Removing Archived Work
- We will never remove material from our archives.
- We will note when the post was updated.
- We will correct any errors we learn of in our archived content and note the corrections.
- We will consider exceptions to our policy in extreme cases, such as abuse or danger to someone’s personal safety.
- We will delete inaccurate social media posts but acknowledge the deletions in subsequent posts.
Hate Speech
- We report on hate speech and actions but include original offensive expressions only when specifically necessary for audience understanding of the case.
Mental Health and Suicide
- We will cover mental health and suicide as broad public health issues as consistently as we cover other health matters.
- We will use the phrases “died by suicide” or “killed himself or herself” and avoid the phrases “committed suicide” and “took his or her own life.”
- We will not describe a suicide attempt as “successful” or “unsuccessful.”
- We will not use sensational headlines on stories about suicide.
- We will not use graphic images on stories about suicide.
- We will opt for everyday images of a person who dies by suicide (such as a school photo) instead of images of people grieving.
- We will Include contact information for resources for people in mental health crises.
- We will include the method used in a suicide when it is important for audience understanding but not specific details (e.g., noting that a victim shot himself but not covering the type of weapon).
Obscenities
- We will use obscenities, vulgarities or slurs only in direct quotations and only if the quote is essential to the story.
- We will replace obscenities, vulgarities and slurs with a descriptor (e.g. “an anti-gay slur”).
Privacy
- We consider the standard for publishing material about private individuals who are thrust into the public eye as higher than that for public individuals.
- We use discretion when it comes to interviewing and publishing material from trauma victims or bystanders because we understand that to do so may cause additional harm to individuals.
Race and Gender
- We will seek out people in the groups we cover to gain perspective on our coverage and terminology.
- We will use racial, ethnic, gender and sexuality identifiers when specifically germane to a story but not otherwise.
- We will identify transgender people by the gender they express publicly.
- We will use plural references to avoid gender-specific pronouns when possible.
Photo and Video
- When documenting private or traumatic moments, we will not seek permission to shoot, but will be sensitive to subjects’ situation.
- We will clearly label posed or re-enacted photos/video.
- If we believe we can provide help or mitigate harm by actively participating in a situation (rather than only documenting it), do so and then disclose your participation to your viewers.
- We will edit or manipulate images only if doing so doesn’t affect the news content of the image or the meaning viewers will make from it.
- We will clearly label the source of all “handout” photos or video.
- When using generic photos, we will make sure they are clearly labeled as such.
- If using music in video stories, we will be cognizant of the emotional effect the music may have, and avoid using music if the story is intended to have a neutral voice.
Accepting money
- Our funder(s) will not be able to see our stories before publication.
- We will publicly disclose all funding sources.
Clickbait and Metrics
- We are encouraged to write clever, creative headlines and social media posts that will entice readers to click on our stories, but headlines will not make promises that our stories don’t deliver.
- We will accurately reflect the content of related stories in headlines and social media posts.
(Thanks to the Online News Association)
