Navigating Reporting Today

 Evan Gallagher

eg271418@ohio.edu

Source: Brendan Smialowski from The New Yorker

Journalists receive more pressure today than arguably any other time in history. The reason: the surplus of information.

Today, it seems so easy for anyone to become a journalist by simply picking up their phone and tweeting about a story they read. However, what many don't realize is that there's a code of ethics journalists have to follow for the sake of their own integrity.

The book Ethics of Journalism presents the idea that journalism is a public service. Thinking about it that way, it's easy to see that there need to be rules put into place.

The ethics codes from NPR is a great example of the rules that have to be put into place in a newsroom: https://www.npr.org/ethics. It takes ideas from the SPJ Code of Ethics, and it shows just how transparent journalists from all walks of life have to be.

These rules are discussed when the methods of journalists getting information become messy. An example is getting access to government records that have been concealed from the public for years.

It's common knowledge that journalists are not as well-regarded in recent years, and there's been a great attempt from organizations to fix that. 

There are many things that can be done to combat this idea. One of them is to cite sources and make it known that there is information coming from somewhere credible.

Of course, the term "fake news" is always going around, and this could be perceived as a threat to the future of journalism. So, the more reporters make an effort to have their sources known, the less likely it is that the term will be used by readers, watchers, etc.

Part of the challenge journalists face is that they are always going to receive negative feedback from those who do not want to hear a story. Going back to the idea of it being a public service, it only goes one way: the reporter to the receiver.

That being said, there is also a great amount of power that journalists have. It is noted in an article from greatvaluecolleges.net that journalism is its own branch of government, having its own duties of serving the people.

Thinking about how our representatives serve us, it makes sense that they are also trying to serve our need for information. After all, how would we know the truth if it weren't for this service.

So, if a journalist is going to have success, they need to realize the responsibility they have. They are supposed to give out the truth, and that is in turn preserving the ideas of a free press.

Going back to this idea of a surplus of information, the skeptics are always going to cause noise. The ethics of being a journalists do not care if the truth is hated; it's just important that it's reported.