Law, Ethics & News Literacy
Law & Ethics
At the start of the school year, I was trained in the fundamentals of journalism law and ethics, with a strong emphasis placed on their importance in responsible reporting. I apply these principles consistently in my work to ensure accuracy, fairness and accountability. The examples below highlight the ways I strive to practice ethical journalism while adhering to legal standards.
For every single story, we have a checklist. The checklists outline and show the requirements for any story. It goes into detail on word counts, formatting, any sub photos needed and much more. The checklists also have the basics such as uploaded audio and transcriptions. This assures that I and others act ethically as a journalist and don't misquote anyone or represent someone inaccurately.
Checklists
Fact-Checking
Fact-checking is one of the most important things. But unfortunately something that many people struggle with, including me. During Cycle 3 I had a year wrong in my story and even though I fact-checked with one source, I didn't make sure to check with more sources, even when the information sounded iffy. this mistake was only caught at the very end. Since this, I have gotten better at noticing when there is something I need to fact-check. fact-checking is now something I know to be crucial and view as one of the most important things to assure I am acting ethically and following journalistic laws.
After each issue of the magazine comes out, many people go back over it and look for errors. Formatting, grammar, names, dates are all things that are looked for. After these are found, they are inserted into the next issue of the magazine in a specific location called "corrections and omissions." This holds the program accountable for any mistakes made. Eventually we hope to get to a point where this section is very short or empty.
Corrections and Ommissions
Each year all staff members sign a contract ensuring they are ethical journalists. Additionally, all editors sign another contract listing their expectations. These contracts hold people accountable and prohibit AI use, using work from other classes, or other compromised work. The contracts are important to ensure our program is doing the right thing.
Staff Contracts
Ethic's
Activity
At the start of the year, as a class we participate in the ethics assignment which introduces foundational journalistic principles through an in-depth study of the SPJ Code of Ethics. We annotate and analyze the code to fully understand its guidelines and expectations, then apply those principles to real-world reporting scenarios. By evaluating which ethical standards apply in different situations, the activity encourages critical thinking and responsible decision-making.
I first truly understood the importance of news literacy in the second semester of my sophomore year while writing our weekly “What’s Happening Now?” news briefs. Through this experience, I learned how to evaluate sources, verify information, and communicate accurate news to our audience. This section reflects my commitment to applying news literacy principles in every story I produce.
News Literacy
For the second semester of my sophomore year, I took over writing our weekly “What’s Happening Now” posts. This meant every week I compiled five global national and local news events, wrote a paragraph about them, got them edited and turned each into a graphic that goes onto our social media. This process has forced me not only to become educated on the state of our world now, but also the importance of fact checking to ensure accuracy of these reported events.
What's Happening Now?
Also, during the second semester we started having “Current Events Days.” This is where we’d take 10 minutes on one day a week to read the news, from stylized profile story to a hard-hitting news stories. Through reading others’ journalism pieces, we’ve been able to grow by picking up writing techniques and story formation.
Current events Day
As social media coordinator one of the important focuses for me was to follow and array of news outlets, from liberal to conservative. This breadth helps me ensure accuracy, reduce bias, and write objectively on a wide variety of issues. This was especially necessary since Donald Trump was elected president and different news stories put his presidency in a different light.
Following Diverse
Sources
Pitches
Another thing we do to ensure news literacy is before each magazine cycle we pitch stories to find ideas. For this we do research on our community and school so that we can guarantee pitches are valuable, we educate one another on our town. Regardless of whether we use the pitch in that moment, we often store ideas to use at later dates.