Do a search on Poynter Online for “plagiarism or ethics or Jayson Blair” for 2003 and you’ll get a list of 274 articles. They range from Romenesko items to detailed accounts of our Journalism Without Scandal conference.
By any measure, Poynter found itself in the midst of a tumultuous year that provoked soul-searching in newsrooms around the country.
It happened at Poynter, too.
The troubling truth was that, even though ethics has been a pillar of Poynter teaching for more than 25 years, we lacked the kind of guidelines for our publishing that we encourage others to develop for theirs.
So we set about creating some.
Back in October, Aly Colon and Roy Clark and I convened a group of about a dozen colleagues, including Jim Romenesko by speaker phone, to lay the groundwork.
We began by brainstorming the values we wanted to ascribe to the guidelines once they were done. Once we settled on seven core values, we assembled standards and practices linked to each of the values.
Next, we asked ourselves: What questions does all this raise that we haven’t answered? That led us to an FAQ. It turns out that didn’t answer all the questions, either.
Here’s one of them: Just what constitutes a personal attack? Our guidelines rule them out, but when does appropriate challenge veer into the kind of ad hominem sniping we want to avoid? We’re still exploring this issue, with the help of some of our readers.
As various news organizations released updated versions of their guidelines in recent weeks, we’ve spotted areas in ours that could use some work. As we work with the guidelines, we’re sure to find areas in need of tweaking.
We see these guidelines not as a set of rules to enforce, but a process to pursue. And rather than smoothing over potential rough edges, we recognize that they’re more apt to expose us to (hopefully) helpful scrutiny.
Among our interesting challenges: Poynter’s dual roles in education and journalism. Our main mission is teaching, and we’re doing more and more of it via our publishing, especially online.
But perfect harmony does not always prevail. In Poynter teaching, we discourage the use of anonymous sources. On Poynter Online, we sometimes link to stories that conflict with that teaching. See the FAQ for a discussion of this and other rough edges.
We invite readers and consumers of Poynter publishing to help us get things right.
If you’d like to peel the onion on a question of journalism ethics, we encourage you to use the ASNE/Poynter Ethics Tool. It’s freely available to any registered user of Poynter Online. If you’re not registered yet, just click New User at the top right of this page, and then, once registered, click on the Ethics Tool at the bottom left rail of this page.
If you spot something that appears to conflict with our guidelines –- or to conflict with what you think our guidelines should say –- please alert us with an e-mail to ethicsalert@poynter.org.
