Welcome to ethicsandjournalism.org, the website of NYU’s Ethics and Journalism Initiative.
Here you’ll find newsroom ethics codes, AI guidelines, a compendium of best practices, topical discussions, and the most useful ethics articles and papers that we can produce or collect. The goal is to help journalists, whether experienced or just starting out, to become more sure-footed in tackling the complex ethical issues that we all face in our work.
Stephen Adler, Director of the Ethics and Journalism Initiative
With staunch support from NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, we launched the Ethics and Journalism Initiative in the fall of 2023 in an effort to provide resources that had become less available at a time of increasing need. For one thing, journalists today receive less legal, financial, and ethics-and-standards support from their newsrooms than they did when the industry was healthier. Also, we work in a more polarized and distrustful environment than in the past, with lies, disinformation, and anti-press sentiment creating challenges and, at times, physical dangers. Plus, artificial intelligence is confronting us with fresh ethical challenges as we grapple with how to use powerful new tools without sacrificing accuracy or integrity.
Since our launch, we have received generous financial contributions from multiple philanthropic funders, as listed below. This support enabled us, in 2024, to launch the Peter F. Collier Awards for Ethics in Journalism and, in 2025, to create a pilot program to offer ethics training in local newsrooms across the country. Both initiatives are thriving and are poised to expand. We also provide individual mentoring, student workshops, and public conversations. All of our services are free of charge.
The idea is to ensure that every student and journalist we can reach learns to recognize ethical issues when they arise and to confront them with skill, humanity, and intelligence.
By taking a leadership role in advancing ethical standards and practices, we naturally also hope to foster more trustworthy journalism in the public interest and thus to improve the credibility and standing of our profession. Of course, we recognize that people inside and outside the media hold a wide range of perspectives on what constitutes ethical journalism. So, to be transparent about our principles, we are sharing them here:
Statement of Journalistic Values
- Honest fact-finding, regardless of where the facts lead.
- Skepticism without cynicism.
- A commitment to challenging false statements and narratives, wherever they arise.
- A commitment to fostering diversity, equity, and inclusion in the practice of journalism.
- A conviction that journalists play a vital role in democracy by holding governments and other powerful institutions to account.
- A refusal to back down when work is accurate; an eagerness to correct when it is wrong.
Guided by these principles, our small team is excited about reaching out to the journalism community through this website and through our events and activities, which we announce here, in our monthly newsletter, and on social media (LinkedIn, Instagram, Bluesky). We hope you’ll use the site and will participate in the programs that interest you. And, please, share with us your thoughts about our work or about ethical issues we should be addressing.
You can reach me at sja9857@nyu.edu. My colleagues Ryan Howzell and Alison Frankel can be reached at ryan.howzell@nyu.edu and alisonfrankel85@gmail.com.
We’re looking forward to working with you!
— Stephen J. Adler, Founder and Director of the Ethics & Journalism Initiative
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