SPJ Code of Ethics

Ethics Code

As I stated in the post before this one, the Society of Professional Journalists' Code of Ethics has not been updated in the past fifteen years. And I think it is safe to say that technology has taken over in those years.

In November of last year, Steve Buttry, Director of Community Engagement at TBD, posted on his blog, his suggestions for updating the Code of Ethics.

He had many reasons,one of them being that technology has changed and needs guidelines that journalists can follow. In his suggestions, he implements social media into the pre-existing clauses. He simply updates old clauses to include detail about what do do when faced with documents,sources,links, etc from the internet.

Irwin Gratz has argued that the Code of Ethics does not need to change. His argument for this is that journalists and technology should conform to the codes that already exist.

The problem with this argument is that the codes are entirely way to vague to conform technology to them. There is no mention of the internet or the web, sources, images, documents, etc taken from the web.

The SPJ recently had a chat about updating the SPJ in which journalists expressed their concerns and suggestions for updating a new code. Here are some of the discussion points that were touched upon.

How do you cite a tweet? a blog? a status update? How do you give credit to a photo taken from Photobucket or Picassa?

There is no mention about whether or not reporters/journalist should keep their private social media accounts completely separate from their professional ones? Can they be linked together?

Links have become equivalent to a works cited page. It provides ethos and attribution to information and quotations. Yet there are no guidelines as to whether links should be required or how they should be used and presented.

Another thing that I am not sure about is whether or not compensation will be a problem. Do we need rules or guidelines that consider whether or not people are making money off of "hits" on the computer? What about paid advertisements, links, or reviews?

When is social media appropriate to use as a way to deliver information and news? When is it not? In a court room? a basketball game? a memorial? a press conference?

These are all open ended questions that journalists have no real,solid answers to. The SPJ Code of Ethics is in serious need of updates to accommodate new technology and vehicles for the spread of information and to give journalists some kind of guide to ethics. It doesn't need to be specific to social networking sites, but a general code of ethics for online journalism would be very useful.