Ethics Transparency in Newspaper Journalism

Here's a fascinating link, an "ethics walk" through a sensitive story. Click the question mark and see the rationale! Of course, you can't do this with every story. This is a "one-off" kind of exercise that can get shopworn pretty quickly. How many of these can you do? Newsroom staffs are shrinking. Certainly such an exercise should boost reader confidence -- unless it has the opposite effect if the readers conclude this would be a good idea for every story.

And spending time explaining what you are doing takes away from doing what you are supposed to be doing. Maybe there's less of a problem than I imagine. Maybe doing one or two of these a year reassures readers that such careful decision-making takes place for every story. Yet like so many of the bells and whistles that the Internet enables and by its existence seems to demand -- I think of those carefully coordinated multimedia stories -- it takes "group time" to do all this stuff. And does group time mean the individual reporters and editors and designers accomplish less? (I am thinking principally of the reporters.)

It's a legitimate question, but it may be that news managers have already worked out the calculus, as it were. That I raise the question may simply be carry over from those happy lone wolf days in the newsroom doing what I wanted when I wanted with no one looking over my shoulder.