Guide for the ethics of community-centered journalism
How do we reconcile the potential tensions between traditional journalistic values (think: enhancing public knowledge) and emerging ones, such as building lasting, trustful relationships with the communities we serve? When journalism is centered around the needs of a community it has the capacity to create more equitable distributions of power. Commitment to building this power with community members requires humility, re-imagination, and sustained work. Unfortunately, our deadline-driven industry often doesn’t afford us to slow down and reconsider new processes and infrastructures. Various ethical codes broadly guide journalists, but none provide specific guidance for individuals working in community-centered journalism.
In early 2020, we started working together in collaboration with the Gather community to create ethical guidelines around community-centered journalism practices. The outcome of which is the initial iteration of Gather’s Guide to Ethics of Engagement. As you’ll see, much of the guide builds on the work already done by so many of you. Our How & Why sections point to both resources on Gather and beyond. And our hope is that this ethics guide will continue to grow as a collaboration, reflective of this community’s values.
This guide, just as our engaged journalism practice, will evolve. We’re committed to updating it periodically with your help and feedback. Please let us know what is missing or what should be changed/updated. To that end, we’ve made our guide available on Gather, along with a handy, printable two-sheet AND a collaborative Google document where we welcome you to make comments and suggestive edits. We’ll revisit these documents at the end of the summer to keep this guide up to date and relevant.
Thank you to everyone who contributed to this guide so far; we’re looking forward to expanding the collaboration.
— Andrew DeVigal, Lynn Walsh and Maia Laperle
