Our Readers Are Watching

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Most journalists have honest intentions.

So did the politicians who ignored warnings that New Orleans’ flood protection system would not withstand a hurricane’s full force. They didn’t want the catastrophe we are seeing, but they didn’t act responsibly to prevent it.

Our business has seen plenty of warnings that our system for teaching and upholding ethical standards is inadequate. It can’t hold back the carelessness and deception that are overwhelming our cherished credibility. We need to do something different.

If ethics codes or lofty pronouncements or conferences or reports were enough to ensure ethical behavior, the newspaper industry would have cleaned its house successfully after the Janet Cooke scandal of 1981. Or after the Patricia Smith and Mike Barnicle scandals of 1998. Or certainly after the Jayson Blair scandal of 2003 showed how vulnerable even the most prestigious of newspapers was. But here we are, more than a year after the Jack Kelley scandal and the New York Times admission of inadequate reporting on weapons of mass destruction, and who can keep track of the scandals large and small across the journalism landscape? We don’t need to repeat the list of offenses and offenders here; you read them regularly in Romenesko.

The behavior of journalists is more today than a matter of satisfying our own consciences or sense of righteousness. In an age when readers have more and more sources of news and information, trust is an issue of economic survival. As then-president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors Peter Bhatia said in addressing a range of ethical issues in his 2004 address to the ASNE convention, “Our readers are watching.”

The American Press Institute offers Our Readers Are Watching, a seminar to help newsrooms clarify, teach and uphold their standards of behavior.

This seminar will help individual newsrooms make their standards clear to the staff, train the staff in the standards and train editors in upholding the standards. Working with leaders in a newsroom, API will ensure that the staff understands the values of the organization, the principles and processes of ethical decision-making and the consequences of unethical decisions. We will involve the readers and remind the staff that readers are watching.

We are pleased to collaborate on this project with Bob Steele and Kelly McBride of the Poynter Institute, who have agreed to join the seminars as discussion leaders as their schedules allow. Poynter has long been a leader in teaching, research and writing on journalism ethics and we appreciate the assistance in this seminar. When neither Bob nor Kelly is available to help lead seminars, we will call on other leaders in journalism training.

This seminar will have a core program with options that will allow a newsroom to address its own specific challenges. We can advise a newsroom in developing a code of ethics, fine-tune an existing code and train the staff in following the code. With or without an explicit code, we can help the staff understand the top editors’ principles and expectations.

We can offer the program in varying formats: one day, multiple days or a yearlong program of repeated visits.

Under any format, this seminar would have five primary purposes:

• To clarify the staff code of ethics or help develop one.
• To help the honest, ethical staff members anticipate ethical dilemmas they might face and learn what the newspaper’s standards are in those cases, how to make ethical decisions and how individual staff members should apply the standards.
• To educate staff members whose values education had gaps (recognizing the disturbing increase of young people who admit to cheating and other unethical conduct).
• To let dishonest staff members know that this newsroom (and this profession) is not the place for any misbehavior.
• To train editors in how to hold staff members to the standards.

Each seminar will include sessions on confidential sources and editors’ role in upholding standards. We also will involve readers in at least one session at each newsroom. Depending on the interests and needs of a newsroom, we also could lead sessions on attribution, accuracy, diversity, undercover reporting, coverage of victims, tape recording, photography, datelines and credits, online editions, ideology and consequences. We also could lead discussions on the ethics of specialized fields such as narrative journalism, investigative reporting or of reporting on business, sports or entertainment.

A typical session would start with API’s discussion leader asking for a clear, brief explanation of the newsroom’s policy on an issue from a senior editor. Then the discussion leader will lead the staff in a role-playing discussion of some real and hypothetical situations and how staff members should respond and make decisions. We will discuss what reporters should do as the issue arises in the field or in their writing and what editors should do when the issue arises on deadline after senior editors have gone home. We will discuss the consequences for varying from the standards.

By the end of each discussion, staff members should have an idea how flexible or firm the newsroom’s standard is, who can grant exceptions, why exceptions might be considered and how staff members will be held accountable.

In the session on confidential sources, the discussion leader will interview a panel, which might include a masthead editor, a line editor, an investigative reporter, a political reporter, one other reporter and two readers. For the first hour or so, the discussion leader will pose questions to the panelists in some role-playing exercises covering the nuances of dealing with confidential sources. For the last half hour or so, the full audience will join the discussion.

Issues we might address:

• How a reporter deals with a source who does not want to be identified (what the reporter tells the source, how they set the terms of confidentiality, how and how often the reporter presses the source to go on the record, how the reporter probes the source’s motives, how the reporter and source agree on how the newspaper will identify the source, how the reporter might be able to verify the source’s claims).
• The difference between a source who approaches a reporter offering dirt, a source approached by the reporter who eagerly offers dirt and a reluctant source the reporter approaches and tries to persuade to talk.
• The difference between a whistle-blower and an anonymous source peddling the official line.
• What sort of information and quotes your paper will use from confidential sources and under what circumstances.
• What editors need to know and ask about confidential sources. Should an editor know the name? Which editor? Should an editor meet with source? Should a second reporter? How high an editor should approve the story and the use of the source?
• Your paper’s standards for verifying information provided by confidential sources.
• Should your paper raise (or lower) its threshold for confidentiality?
• Should your reporters participate in background briefings by public officials who ought to be able to speak on the record?
• Should you use confidential sources in cases where you are merely beating the competition to get information in the paper or scooping a public announcement, rather than doing public-interest stories that would not make the paper without confidential sources?
• How do you handle wire stories that don’t meet your paper’s standards for confidential sources?
• Do you need to count and monitor the instances when your paper prints information from confidential sources?
• Under what circumstances, if any, would your newspaper give a court notes or other material identifying confidential sources? Who has custody of the notes – the reporter or the newspaper?

We hope to present Our Readers Are Watching in your newsroom soon. The cost of the seminar will be based on a newspaper’s circulation. For the first newspaper to schedule the seminar, we will waive API’s fee, charging the host newspaper only for expenses.

We don’t presume that one seminar will solve all of our industry’s ethical problems. We do believe this seminar will help protect your newsroom against the next credibility disaster threatening our industry.

sbuttry@americanpressinstitute.org

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