commbasics

I've been holding off on writing this post because I hoped things would turn around, but I don't think that's going to happen. A couple of weeks ago I posted a piece on ethics in journalism and public relations. I wrote that piece the week I sent out a brief survey to a little more than 100 journalists and PR practitioners, most in the SF Bay Area. The questions were pretty straight forward. "Are you aware of any published professional code of journalism or public relations ethics? If so, please name the organization that has published that code and do not answer the following questions. "If not, have you made signed a document attesting to your adherence to a specific code of ethics from your place of employment? "Is that code of ethics published by your place of employment and if so, where can it be found?" I got about a 25 percent return on the survey, which is not bad, The sampling was pretty low, so I doubt you could call this scientific. But here...

Over the mast few months, several of my favorite journalists (like EDN's Mike Santarini and freelancer Chris Edwards in the UK) have made public statements about the atrocious state of news releases. Now having a newsman complain about news releases is not anything new. But the fact is, for the most part, I agree with them and have talked about it previously in this blog. Love them or hate them, news releases have been an important part of journalism for 100 years. They are not going anywhere, anytime soon so we may as well learn how to do them and use them properly. Edwards goes into a bit more detail where he stands on releases in this audio interview . It may not be common knowledge for the press (in fact, I know it's not because when I tell them they are generally surprised), but news releases are considered to be legal documents for public companies (which is why some companies like Intel, make partner companies jump through hoops to be involved in them. Industry has...

Recently, there has been some discussion about ethics in journalism and public relations in light of the devolution of the journalism business model. So I thought I'd start a short discussion on ethics. This is part. Part two will reveal the results of a survey I am taking among journalists and public relations practitioners. Many publications organizations are rethinking what covering news really means. Is it blogging? Custom publications? Does objective reporting really mean anything? Does anyone really want it anymore? And most importantly, what are the ethical standards in this new age? Ethics create an interesting issue. Many people talk about ethics like they know what the term means. I have some personal stake in this issue. As a student journalist at San Jose State University, and member of Sigma Delta Chi (Society of Professional Journalists) I was part of the nationwide development of the first code of ethics for journalists that we ratified in 1973. That code h...