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When Jelani Cobb, the dean of Columbia Journalism School, approached me early in my two-year stint at the Newmark Center for Journalism Ethics and Security to suggest a project taking a fresh look at journalism ethics in the digital age, I wondered if there really would be much to report.

After all, I thought, times may change, but ethical standards do not. Or at least they should not. Good journalists value honesty, transparency, rigorous reporting, source protection, and independence from commercial or political pressure. Surely that remains true no matter the delivery system for journalism or how the business has changed.

Many months later, that initial response turns out to be not wrong, exactly, but certainly incomplete. The old rules do deserve reexamination, I found. We live in an era that has brought dilemmas and choices into consideration that simply didn’t exist through most of my career. 

I was lucky to have Julie Gerstein as a partner in this project. We are of different generations and different kinds of journalism experience. Julie entered the field as a digital native. She has worked as a writer and editor at BuzzFeed News and Business Insider, both digital outlets from the start. By contrast, my background is in newspaper journalism, a field that has steadily moved—sometimes kicking and screaming—into the digital age. I also moved from doing local journalism at my hometown daily in Buffalo to national journalism at the New York Times and the Washington Post to international journalism as a columnist at The Guardian, where I write mostly for its all-digital American edition. Some of my most challenging ethical decisions came while I was top editor of the Buffalo News, but that was before the press was under such constant attack from elected officials, and before the age of AI.

After many conversations with top editors and standards editors at the nation’s largest outlets, journalism educators, and other experts, Gerstein and I learned a lot. With the help of the editors at CJR and Kate Ortega of the Newmark Center staff, we’ve explored subject areas that would never have occurred to me as a young reporter in Buffalo, that may even have seemed like notions out of fantasy fiction. How news organizations should deal with artificial intelligence. How to cover politicians who lie and mislead the public as an essential part of their personas—and who get away with it, due to today’s thoroughly fragmented media universe. How social media acts as a double-edged sword for reporters and editors. How to run a successful and ethical nonprofit newsroom without giving way to philanthropic pressure. What journalists owe their sources. Whether traditional objectivity, as a measuring rod for good journalism, has run its course.

After exploring these questions in a series of five reports, we asked for comments on our findings from more than a dozen distinguished journalists and educators, including Jay Rosen at New York University, Elena Cherney at the Wall Street Journal, and Swati Sharma at Vox. They all brought depth and perspective to our project, and we are very grateful.

Writing this series confirmed that journalism’s core ideals haven’t changed. We still believe in journalism that serves the public interest with fairness, independence, accuracy, and a strong sense of mission. But functioning in today’s world involves facing fast-evolving ethical dilemmas. New ground rules and guidelines help. Then they change, and change again.

Many thanks to those who gave so generously of their time, experience, and insight to this project of many months. We hope that acknowledging the tension between the tried-and-true and the once-unimaginable can help find a way forward along today’s rocky journalistic path. 

Journalists, and journalism students, face difficult ethical choices on a daily basis—all too often under deadline—and we hope that our effort to puzzle through these choices will provide some guidance. We hope to hold up a lantern, or more fittingly, a multi-wavelength digital flashlight. And to let you know that you’re not alone.

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