Walk into a corner of a newsroom somewhere and you can often find it affixed to a bulletin board, perhaps peeking out from behind the coffee pot: the Society of Professional Journalists’s Code of Ethics. It’s less than a thousand words, fitting neatly on a poster. But those words — organized around four key journalistic principles — are important enough, asserts Dan Axelrod, that they just might save our democracy.
This is to protect society. There but for the grace of God goes a society without journalists.” Axelrod is talking not only about the existence of the code but the need, every so often, to update it. It’s a laborious process, taking about a year and countless hours of meetings and feedback, virtual and in person.
Yet as the media landscape seems to shift daily and new technologies emerge, SPJ has decided that the time is at hand — for the first time in 12 years, and only the sixth in the code's century-long history. A conclave, of sorts, to update the code The seriousness of the undertaking brought the committee and other media ethics experts to Indianapolis in June, after lots of virtual meetings. Seems it wasn't the most relaxing way to spend a weekend.
He explains there was “a lot of smithing of the words.” The result: No white smoke, but a 967-word draft code, 73 longer than the existing one. But why update in the first place? The first reason — hardly a surprise — is the rapid emergence of AI.
Meanwhile, the business of journalism has changed so much financially, and a third of journalists don’t work for a traditional news organization. In 1926 it adopted its first code of ethics, then formed an ethics committee in 1948 and revised the code five times — the last in 2014. The four, unchanging key principles: “Seek Truth and Report It.” “Minimize Harm.” “Act Independently.” “Be Accountable and Transparent.” But much else has evolved.
A report accompanying the draft notes that traditional newsroom jobs are dwindling as the industry contracts. Simultaneously, it says, there’s been a marked growth in citizen journalists, freelancers, online influencers and pundits. The report cites a Pew study that shows fully one-third of journalists were freelance or self-employed in 2023.
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