Times Change, and So Can Ethics

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.