For a century, journalists have had a voluntary ethics code. Editors are giving it an AI-era reboot

NEW YORK (AP) — 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.“I’m going to just say it,” says Axelrod, chairman of the SPJ Ethics Committee and former longtime Gannett business reporter. ”This is the way to protect democracy.

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 codeThe 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.“Passions definitely got heated,” Axelrod says.“Well, there were no fistfights,” quips his colleague, Chris Roberts, vice chairman of the committee and a journalism professor at the University of Alabama.

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.“We were thinking about artificial intelligence and how it’s used and sometimes misused by news organizations,” Roberts says, “as they confront that new technology that saves them money, but also causes a lot of trouble if it’s not used effectively and ethically.”Another issue concerns the very term “professional journalists.” Recent years have seen a huge increase in independent, so-called “creator journalists." The SPJ thinks they, too, should have a code to guide them. (The code, as always, is a voluntary guide and not enforceable.)One key goal is to address an existential crisis …

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. “I’m going to just say it,” says Axelrod, chairman of the SPJ Ethics Committee and former longtime Gannett business reporter.

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.

“Passions definitely got heated,” Axelrod says. “Well, there were no fistfights,” quips his colleague, Chris Roberts, vice chairman of the committee and a journalism professor at the University of Alabama. The first reason — hardly a surprise — is the rapid emergence of AI.