BY TERI FINNEMAN
Before the pandemic, I spent a considerable amount of my time traveling around the country talking about journalism.
What I talk about exactly depends on the audience. Much of the time, I discuss the history of journalism and why it matters today. However, I also do journalism training on using social media, podcasting, etc. Those trainings have also included discussions with the public about how journalism works.
As we begin our transition to getting eudoratimes.com built as our future website home, it seemed like a good time to discuss a few things locally. The pandemic has hindered our team’s ability to be in the community as much as we wished in the past year.
However, I would like to move forward with launching a Readers Board. My former newspaper, The Fargo Forum, has successfully hosted these for years, and I started one at the Columbia Missourian several years ago.
This is an opportunity for community members to meet with the news team to learn more about how journalism works and to share your input for what you would like to see covered in the community. We would then rotate members each year.
If you are interested in serving on our Readers Board – which would meet via Zoom to start – send us an email by March 5 with your name, occupation (or retired, if that’s the case), and why you want to serve on the Readers Board to eudoratimes@gmail.com. We aim to have about eight people on the board at a time and to meet for an hour or so four times a year.
Related to this, another factor in how journalism works is being transparent about our ethics policy, which we will incorporate into the new website.
In recent years, there has been a significant decline in trust in media. This requires us to discuss more often the policies we know we have in place, but the public doesn’t always know exist.
More than once, I’ve heard people scoff about the ethics of journalism. Here’s a large factor in why that happens. You can compare it to the airline industry. No one reads about the thousands of planes that fly successfully every day. It’s the norm. When you do hear something, it’s because something has gone horribly wrong and a plane has crashed.
The same is true of journalism. Ethics are our norm. But the only time the public hears about journalism ethics is when something has gone horribly wrong, which then creates the perception that the whole industry has issues when, in reality, the reason you’re reading about it in the first place is because the industry has punished those who break the norm.
The New York Times has an extremely in-depth policy for its reporters that can be found here: https://www.nytimes.com/editorial-standards/ethical-journalism.html
Similarly, the Washington Post also publicizes its policy here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/ask-the-post/wp/2016/01/01/policies-and-standards/
Since the beginning, the Eudora Times reporters have also followed an ethics policy. It’s just that we never publicized it. Here are the team’s guidelines:
Reporters may not:
Interview friends or relatives
Accept free food or gifts of any value amount from sources
Pay anyone for information unless payment is required for documents under open records requests
Grant any source anonymity without approval from the publisher. Anonymity includes using first names only. All sources must provide first and last names.
Sign political petitions, participate in political parties, make contributions to political parties or advocate for political parties in any way, including on social media
Work undercover or hide their reporter status when working on a story
Participate in what they are covering without approval from the publisher
Audio record someone without consent
In addition, Eudora Times reporters must sign and acknowledge that they have read the broader Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics found here: https://www.spj.org/ethicscode.asp
We look forward to our new website launching this spring and our new Readers Board developing to continue these discussions.
Reach publisher Teri Finneman at eudoratimes@gmail.com.
To donate to support our community journalism, please go to this link: tinyurl.com/y4u7stxj
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