Being ethical is one of the main concern for journalists. It should be, anyway. Chapter 6 of Going Live by Philip Seib focuses on ethics in journalism.
Journalists of course have their own code of ethics. Most importantly, journalists have the job of reporting the truth and the facts. This is accomplised in part by being transparent. Transparency is the writers practice of showing no bias or personal opinion. If the reader is able to detect the writer's opinion in the article, then the journalist has not done their job.
Presenting both sides to every story is crucial to staying ethical. Reading this chapter made me think back to the last Setonian all-staff organizational meeting. For the upcoming issue, we talked about writing a story on the post office and students having trouble with lost mail. Somebody said, "post office inadequacy!" and Amanda, our editor in cheif, quickly corrected that person for being one sided.
The reporter of this story would need to interview students who have had trouble as well as students who are satisfied with the service of the post office so it would not look like an attack. The reporter also would need to talk to employees of the post office in order to discover where the problems actually lie.
In this chapter, Seib discusses the issues of putting news online. The ability to post news online is a double edged sword. The internet allows for immediate posting of any type of information. This would seem beneficial to journalists in the sense of timliness, but it also proves to be problematic.
In the rush to be the first to post a story online, a journalist could overlook problems in the story. Sometimes breaking news is sketchy with the facts because not all of the facts are yet known. Journalists have to watch posting news online quickly because they may be publishing information that is only speculation.