Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
Law/Ethics
When working with a relatively inexperienced staff, there are always a high number of potential sources for error. In spite of this, our staff seeks to always maintain high standards in our writing and newsgathering process to ensure that our reporting maintains the highest possible standards of ethics and avoids unintentional bias.
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The piece of art that ran with the described story
Avoiding bias
The Prospector takes its role as a source of information for the local community very seriously, and as editor-in-chief I believe it is essential to be constantly vigilant for any potential sources of unintentional bias or error in our reporting, focusing heavily on making sure that news stories or features do not contain unintentional bias by making sure that many different sets of eyes see a story before its publication.
Earlier this school year, we halted the running of a column that covered a particular set of new laws until it went through a stringent set of revisions led by myself and several other members of the executive board. While it had some liberty due to its status as a column, the writer’s opinions were clearly based on false and misleading background knowledge and research, and allowing it to run in its original state would have presented a false representation of the issue to our readers. Only after the other editors and I were convinced that the story would not propagate harmful or untrue information was it allowed to run in the newspaper.
Even then, many members of staff — including, admittedly, myself — took issue with the writer’s stance on the issue; however, we were careful to correspond actively with the writer while editing and revising in order to ensure that their voice would be heard and that we would not be stifling his ability to use our publication as a forum for public discourse.
Confidential sources
Confidentiality is a highly important subject when writing sensitive stories. I have employed anonymous sources multiple times throughout my career, from topics ranging from cheating to womens’ reproductive rights. When including anonymous sources, it is always important to balance the positives of adding more voices to a topic against the drawback of limiting transparency for readers.
One particularly difficult choice came when I was writing an article about our school’s mask-wearing policies, as one student source I discovered wished to remain anonymous because they did not want their feelings to be known by their classmates. While our staff’s policy is to seek non-anonymous sources whenever possible to increase transparency, I ultimately determined that this particular student was worthy of an exception because of sensitive subjects surrounding the health of their family members that they divulged.
This choice is never easy and is made on a case-by-case basis, but the hard line must always come down to what is best for the health and safety of the source coupled with the best interests of our readers.
Image Sourcing
Our staff is certainly no stranger to using art not created by our photographers or cartoonists; whether it be in news stories on national events, profiles of community members, or reviews, there are always many images from outside sources used on our website or in our paper at any given time.
Our policy when using images sourced from outside our program is to always use images that are available with a Creative Commons license, whether it be for a piece of main art or just an supplemental side graphic.
When using images that sources give us directly, we always credit the person who took the photo, or, if that person is unknown, we will credit the person who we received the photo from. In the case of movie or video game stills or album covers used for reviews, we credit the studio/publisher of the artwork.
Source Gathering and Diversity
As the voice of our school, it is essential that we represent all members of our community as equally as possible. One issue we had noticed during our evaluation of last year's productions was that we tended to reuse the same source multiple times over when in need of someone of a certain demographic.
To combat this, we created a source spreadsheet document that every staff member fills out at the end of each issue cycle as a way to document when a source has been used and in what context. This way, when someone is in need of a source, they can cross-reference the spreadsheet to ensure that the same voices are not being disproportionately represented in our publication.
