Help us craft an updated code of ethics

On these two pages, readers will find one of the most important documents in any newsroom.

For more than a year, a newsroom task force has been revising The Spokesman-Review’s newsroom code of ethics, the first major revision in more than a decade.

Today, we’re presenting the near-final draft of the code to our readers. It also is available online. We hope you’ll respond, offering suggestions, proposed deletions, additions or changes. Late this month and early next, we’ll host three community meetings (see box below) to take additional comment. Our task force will review public response as well as final suggestions from the staff before preparing the final code. Once completed, it will be prominently posted on spokesmanreview.com and reprinted in the newspaper.

The lengthy revision process involved representatives from every newsroom department and was facilitated by Whitworth University journalism professor Gordon Jackson, who also will facilitate the public meetings. By the time of its final adoption and implementation, the revised code will have been reviewed and vetted several times by Spokesman newsroom staff, will have been presented to the public and will have been reviewed by newsroom managers. The result will be an effective road map to professional conduct that embodies our long-standing craft values as well as the posted professional and news values of The Spokesman-Review newsroom.

This code revision, for the first time, takes into account ethical land mines presented by our online journalism, including blogs. The code makes a strong statement about the newsroom’s independence from special interests and its independence from the newspaper’s owners when covering their activities and business interests. And it is more specific than in the past about how our journalists can – and must – avoid conflicts of interest.

A complete understanding of our code is expected of every newsroom staff member. Code violations carry consequences and can lead to disciplinary action up to and including termination.

This code of ethics, including a published values statement, provides a framework against which the quality of routine and extraordinary news decisions can be evaluated, both by SR journalists and by our readers. We expect readers to hold us accountable. And we’ll ask our new independent ombudsman, to be named shortly, to use the code as a framework for that observer’s monthly critiques.

Going public with this process is, as far as I know, unprecedented. It’s an experiment. Our hope is that public involvement will make future conversations on newspaper performance more focused and maybe more productive than we sometimes see in our blogs and e-mail exchanges.

Steven A. Smith

Editor