Demonstrators hold signs as they protest outside Dodger Stadium on Saturday, June 21, 2025, in Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes)

July 22, 2025

ICE raids and immigration reporting: lessons from the field; Censoring expletives?; New ethics judge; Climate reporting event; Writing headlines: ethics v. SEO; Return to campus; AI mandates

By Alison Frankel,
Senior Advisor
with Mica Rosenberg,
Investigative Reporter, ProPublica

The stakes are high for reporters on the migrant beat. To provide guidance and insight, Ethics and Journalism Initiative senior advisor Alison Frankel talked to ProPublica investigative reporter Mica Rosenberg, who has specialized in immigration reporting for nearly two decades and previously was part of an EJI panel discussion about covering migrants.

We asked Mica about building trust, fielding sources’ requests for assistance, navigating Trump administration changes to enforcement, reader fatigue, and what it means to write “balanced” immigration coverage. Excerpts below.

ALISON: How do you assure yourself that people understand the risk of talking to you?

MICA: In an ideal situation, it’s a long process with a lot of conversations and a lot of transparency and also assuring that people understand the language that you’re speaking in.

I’ll share links to other stories that I’ve done, in cases where people have used their names or where they have been anonymous or when we have photographed people using their faces or where we photographed them concealing their faces. [I’m] trying to show people the range of different options that they have, but then also what it will look like when it’s published.

I also want to let people know that there could be negative implications so that they can make the decision for themselves if this is something that they want to publicize.

It’s surprising a lot of times. People are scared, but if something really egregious has happened to them, they often do want that out there. They want people to know about it. They want the public to be aware of it.

ALISON: It seems like there’s so much risk in drawing any kind of attention to yourself in this environment. Have people become less willing to talk? 

MICA: People have a whole range of motivations for wanting to talk when they realize that the kind of work we’re doing is very rigorous and serious and [that we are committed to] getting all the facts right. Even people inside government want to make sure that we’re getting everything right.

As far as immigrants who are being affected by this, if something has happened to their families, they don’t want [their family member] to be” disappeared” or forgotten about. We’ve been talking a lot to family members of the men who’ve been deported to the prison in El Salvador. Obviously, [they’re in] a very dangerous and precarious position, but a lot of the families say, you know, my family member is basically disappeared. They’re grateful that somebody hasn’t forgotten them. 

ALISON: How do you assure that your coverage is balanced?

MICA: I’ve spent a lot of time talking to people who are in the brain trust that supplied policy ideas to the Trump administration. A lot of them come from groups that have advocated for lower levels of immigration, who’ve said that this system – where you can show up at the border and request asylum and then go into a court system that’s backlogged for years [while you] live in the country – is really a broken system.

We see it as a Trump administration thing, but this has been going on for a long time over a lot of different administrations. Obama also deported a record number of people. And there’s basically been no change in immigration law over that time.

It’s about understanding the whole complexity of the system. And then once you have that, then you can draw the lines: People shouldn’t die in detention. Families shouldn’t be separated. People shouldn’t be sent to war zones.

The balance comes from acknowledging that this isn’t always coming from one particular party or from one particular side of the political spectrum.

A barricade blocks a road during heavy rains, Sunday, July 13, 2025, in Kerrville, Texas. (AP Photo/Eric Gay)

Smoke lingers over a neighborhood devastated by the Eaton Fire, Thursday, Jan. 9, 2025, in Altadena, Calif. (AP Photo/John Locher)

The recent floods in Texas, which took the lives of at least 135 people, have reanimated questions about the media’s role in covering increasingly prevalent and severe climate disasters. Covering climate, from fires in Maui and Los Angeles to extreme heat across the country, is a full newsroom endeavor, pulling in reporters across beats to track fast-moving developments, communicate scale and impact, and offer the documentation and resources that might aid communities in preparing for future destruction.

This fall, we’re hosting a panel that tackles the ethical decision-making at the heart of climate reporting in partnership with NYU’s Science, Health, and Environmental Reporting Program. Stay tuned for more details. In the meantime, we recommend this recent interview from the Columbia Journalism Review with Bridget Bennett, a freelance photojournalist, on the challenges of conveying the threat of extreme heat.

President Donald Trump addresses a joint session of Congress at the Capitol in Washington, Tuesday, March 4, 2025. (AP Photo/Ben Curtis)

Back in June, President Donald Trump made news for his use of the word “fuck” in an impassioned rant about a failed ceasefire between Iran and Israel. What media outlets did next generated a new wave of attention: Some broadcasters bleeped or cut the word entirely, others used dashes or asterisks to allude to the word without reprinting it, still others printed it in its unvarnished glory.

For Poynter, Angela Fu details the history of reprinting profanity in news reports (it’s common practice for mainstream outlets to avoid it) and considers whether recent reporting on Trump’s speech is an outlier. Read that here. We also found this earlier piece from Salt Lake City’s Deseret News, written months before Trump’s f-bomb, that tackles the question of public profanity more broadly. As expletives become more commonplace in public figures’ speech, how are newsrooms to respond and adapt?

Our view: Whether you approve of public profanity as reflecting a less formal, more candid society or disapprove of it as encouraging incivility, when the president of the United States employs it, the offending words are newsworthy — and should never be censored. The public has a right to know exactly what the president has said, and any profanity is part of the tenor of the statement. Plus, as a matter of accountability journalism, it’s the media’s responsibility to let the public know when the president — or any public official — is using terms that many constituents may consider offensive. Send us an email to let us know if you agree.

A sample of the Maine daily and weekly newspapers is seen, Tuesday, Aug. 1, 2023, in Augusta, Maine. (AP Photo/Robert F. Bukaty)

In an era in which publishers rely on search engines and social media to drive traffic to their news coverage, headlines are arguably the most crucial component of every story. News consumers understand this reality, said Subramanian Vincent, director of the Journalism and Media Ethics program at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University. Headlines for major news stories are routinely scrutinized on social media, Vincent said, especially when news outlets revise headlines as stories develop.

Paradoxically, few news organizations address the mechanics of headline writing in their ethics codes, Vincent said. Headlines are the first and most important interface between readers and journalists, but the complex process of devising these crucial story-summaries-cum-sales-pitches is mostly opaque.

In a new paper, Guardrails for News Headlining: Principles and Workflow, Vincent calls on the news industry to do better, both in applying ethical principles to the headline-writing process and in communicating those principles to audiences.

“I wanted to find a way to navigate the issue without ducking the complexity of it,” he said. “There is going to be some conflict. But how do we resolve the conflict with a set of principles that everyone can read and say, “I recognize these?’”

We are thrilled to announce that Adam Ganucheau, editor-in-chief of Mississippi Today, will join the judging panel for the Collier Awards for Ethics in Journalism in our second cycle. Last  April, Ganucheau and Mississippi Today investigative reporter Anna Wolfe took home first prize in the Local Category for their fearless coverage of the fallout from their prize-winning exposé of Mississippi’s $77 million welfare scandal, despite an ongoing lawsuit against Mississippi Today by a powerful ex-governor. A judge dismissed the lawsuit days before Ganucheau accepted the prize.

Ganucheau will join a panel of returning judges, including 2025 keynote speaker Dean Baquet, who heads The New York Times’ Local Investigations Fellowship.

A Columbia Journalism student journalist shows off their sign as they cover the events at Hamilton Hall at Columbia University on Tuesday, April 30, 2024, in New York. (Michael M. Santiago/Pool Photo via AP)

It’s almost August, which means thousands of student journalists are due to make their reporting debuts – many will start with covering their own campuses and administrations.

Supporting student journalists is a key part of our mission. Earlier this year, we awarded University of Florida senior Garrett Shanley the Collier Award for Ethics in Journalism, student category, for his unflinching account of a high-stakes, politically charged showdown between faculty members and university administrators at the University of Florida.  

As we head back to campus, Ethics and Journalism Initiative Graduate Student Assistant Maya Boddie shares a quick refresher for student journalists on their rights and responsibilities when covering campus tensions.

In some newsrooms, AI use is quickly evolving from discouraged to optional to mandatory. Here are three stories we’ve been following closely:

Law360 is now requiring reporters to run every published story through an AI “bias” detector. The outlet’s union, representing more than half of the newsroom’s editorial staffers, has pushed back against the new mandate. Nieman Lab reports.

Mathias Döpfner, head of Axel Springer, owner of POLITICO, Business Insider, and BILD, announced his intent to go all in on AI – and do away with transparency guidance popularized across media ethics circles –  at a town hall last week. The quote of the session: “Nobody in the company has to explain in the company why she or he is using A.I. to do something—whether to prepare a presentation or analyze a document. You only have to explain if you didn’t use A.I. That’s really something you have to explain because that shouldn’t happen.” Status’s Oliver Darcy reports.

And Semafor’s media reporter Max Tani suggests Axios may be walking back old guidelines barring AI-written stories: “That was written years ago and was unnecessarily limiting as we’ve learned more about what AI tools can and can’t do.”

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