Ethical Decision-Making

Strengthen Your Ethical Decision-Making. 

To help organizations understand the foundation and elements of ethical decision-making, Poynter provides tailored workshops and programs to help your team create ethical stories, policies and work environments. Led by the Craig Newmark Center for Ethics and Leadership team, our specialized programs are grounded in the difficult realities of the marketplace and focused on the highest standards of journalistic values to help you navigate difficult issues amid a challenging news environment.

What We Offer

Poynter partners with your organization to review and revise your ethics policies in a collaborative process that includes both leadership and staff. We isolate the pressing issues that tend to derail organizations or harm the culture, and look for common ground to build policies that acknowledge the complicated experience of many journalists. We then work with you to develop a training plan to help enact these new policies across the newsroom. These include, but are not limited to, the following 90-minute workshops, all of which can all be developed into longer programs to cover a topic in more depth:

• Better Reporting and Ethics for Editors: Using a series of tools, become a better editor and coach, make more sound ethical decisions and strengthen newsroom relationships.
• Navigating Social Media Crises: Discover how to identify the best journalistic reasons to be on social media, discuss how to form social media policies and determine appropriate crisis responses.
• Practical Legal Advice for Journalists: Unpack the legal questions you may find yourself facing daily, such as fair use, plagiarism and recording interviews.
• Transforming Crime Coverage into Public Safety Journalism: Improve crime reporting by learning the best practices of public safety journalism and exploring how to invest in existing resources to document trends and hold law enforcement accountable.
• Building a Culture of Healthy Ethical Decision-Making: Learn how to integrate and practice a collaborative ethical decision-making process from the moment you have an idea until well after your work is published, so that you think about ethics during every step.

Poynter’s ethics experts helped our team strengthen our policies, procedures and decision-making in support of quality journalism. I would highly recommend Poynter’s ethics program as an invaluable support system for any newsroom.” – Hannah Karp, Editorial Director of Billboard