JORM 2085: ENGLISH NEWS

REPORTING AND WRITING

WEEK 9: JOURNALISM CODE OF

ETHICS

MR SIU CHI YUI, PHILA

 GRADED ASSIGNMENT 2
 Attend a mock press briefing. Ask questions.
 Write up a story and email it to me philasiu@hkbu.edu.hk

 15% of your grade

 Deadline: 18 Nov (Thurs), 11.59pm

 Write your story in a Word document. (NOT PDF)

 Name of the Word doc should be your name: Chan Tai Man

 If you submit it after midnight, for example, Nov 5, 00.01am,

you get 10% marks deducted.
 If you submit after Nov 5, 1am, your story will not be accepted
= zero marks
 Rubic (grading criteria) is already in Moodle
 MOCK SCENARIO
 The HK government has announced earlier this week that 1.65
million people in the city lived in poverty in 2020.
 Your editor has assigned you to interview an underprivileged
family to do a feature story on this.
 Your interviewee is Mr Peter Ho, a single father who lives with
his 2-year-old daughter in a subdivided flat in Sham Shui Po.
He has a lot of complaints, especially about his living
conditions.


 DIGITAL JOURNALISM FROM LAST WEEK…
 Should I quote someone who has some interesting comments on Twitter?
 Should I use his photos or videos?

 Find out:
 Is this person real?

 Does he / she have the blue ticks?

 Is this a re-post or an original?

 Did they take this photo?

 Is this person at the scene now?

 You want to maximise the reach of your posts / article.
 Google Trend: In deciding what words to use, esp on
headlines, check out which words are trending

 https://trends.google.com.hk/trends/?geo=HK

 How would you write the headline / tweet a story about ex

US President Trump?
 What about a story about the coronavirus outbreak?
 DOMAIN NAME SEARCH
 https://domainbigdata.com/
 Exercises: find out as much about this websites as
possible
 https://www.consulum.com/
 LIVE BLOGS
 Increasingly common these days, especially in protests
with a lot of developments
 https://
www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/politics/article/303104
4/chaos-expected-across-hong-kong-anti-government-pr
otesters
 (SCMP Live blog October 1)
LIVE BLOGS
 Introduction: what is it about?
 Short blog posts, usually every 15 mins

 Lots of photos and videos

 Lots of description

 Your readers should develop a sense of “presence” as

they read it

 BUT: don’t be too trivial

 Problems: sometimes you forget about your safety as
you always feel you need to send stuff back to newsroom
VERIFYING PHOTOS
 Tools to do reverse image searches:
 Yandex: https://yandex.com/

 Tineye: https://tineye.com/
 Someone just tweeted this photo and said this terrorist attack
just happened in New York. How do you verify?
 Someone just posted this on Facebook to say this
happened in London. How do you verify?
 Who is he?
 JOURNALISM CODE OF ETHICS
 Hong Kong Journalists’ Association code of ethics:

 1. A journalist has a duty to maintain the highest professional

and ethical standards.
 2. A journalist shall at all times defend the principle of the
freedom of the press and other media in relation to the collection
of information and the expression of comment and criticism.
He/She shall strive to eliminate distortion, news suppression and
censorship.
 3. A journalist shall strive to ensure that the information he/She
disseminates is fair and accurate, avoid the expression of
comment and conjecture as established fact and falsification by
distortion, selection or misrepresentation.

  Fact check everything you’re told, as much as possile. Even if

you’re told by the government.
 Don’ t write: The government is ridiculous.

 Try: Pro-democracy criticised the government’s decision, calling

it “ridiculous”.
 4. A journalist shall rectify promptly and harmful
inaccuracies, ensure that correction and apologies receive due
prominence and afford the right of reply to persons criticised
when the issue is of sufficient importance.
 If you accuse someone of something, you must give them a
right to reply, even if they decline to. It’s their choice.
 5. A journalist shall obtain information, photographs and
illustrations only by straight forward means. The use of other
means can be justified only by over-riding considerations of
the public interest. The journalist is entitled to exercise a
personal conscientious objection to the use of such means.
 6. Subject to justification by over-riding considerations of the
public interest, a journalist shall do nothing which entails
intrusion into private grief and distress.
 7. A journalist shall protect confidential sources of
information.
 8. A journalist shall not accept bribes or shall he/she allow
other inducements to influence the performance of his/her
professional duties.
  Think about this: should you accept a politician’s red
packets in Chinese New Year?
 9. A journalist shall not lend himself/herself to the distortion
or suppression of the truth because of advertising or other
considerations.
  You’re writing a story critical of a big company. Your
friend works there and he tells you not to run the story. What
do you do?
 10. A journalist shall not originate material which encourages
discrimination on grounds of race, colour, creed, gender or
sexual orientation.
 11. A journalist shall not take private advantage of information
gained in the course of his/her duties, before the information is
public knowledge.
  You interviewed the CEO of a listed company. He told you
his company has made huge profit and planned to acquire the
majority shares of another, smaller listed company. Can you
buy the stocks of that smaller company before your article is
published, knowing that the stock price will definitely go up?
OTHER CODE OF ETHICS
 1) Do not mislead the public by quoting out of context,
distorting facts or twisting original meaning.
 For example: you spend 60 mins interviewing a politician. He
spent 59 mins talking praising the government and just 1 min
criticising the gov. You don’t write a story that says he is a
critic of the gov. Present the interview in its totality.
 2) Privacy of children should be handled with particular care.
Media organizations should have solid editorial reasons for
reporting on the private lives of children. Journalists should not
intrude into the privacy of children solely because of the social
or celebrity status of the minors' family members or guardians.
 3) Photojournalism code of ethics:
 It is the prime duty of photojournalists to report the truth.
Photojournalists should take photographs from the actual scene of
a news event. They should not participate in designing or
directing re-enactment of news events for exaggerated and
inaccurate reports.
 Photojournalists should show concern about the feelings of
victims and their families when photographing accidents and their
aftermaths, so as to avoid and/or minimize the damage to and
impact on the feelings of the victims and their families.
 THE NEW YORK TIMES ETHICS AND STANDARD
 https://www.nytimes.com/editorial-standards/ethical-journalis
m.html
#
 -Staff members should disclose their identity to people they
cover (whether face to face or otherwise), though they need
not always announce their status as journalists when seeking
information normally available to the public.
 Staff members may not pose as police officers, lawyers,
business people or anyone else when they are working as
journalists. (As happens on rare occasions, when seeking to
enter countries that bar journalists, correspondents may take
cover from vagueness and identify themselves as traveling on
business or as tourists.)
 https://
www.nytimes.com/editorial-standards/guidelines-on-integrity.htm
l
 Readers should be able to assume that every word between
quotation marks is what the speaker or writer said. The Times
does not “clean up” quotations. If a subject’s grammar or taste is
unsuitable, quotation marks should be removed and the awkward
passage paraphrased. 
 Writers at The Times are their own principal fact checkers and
often their only ones.
 Because our voice is loud and far-reaching, The Times recognizes
an ethical responsibility to correct all its factual errors, large and
small. The paper regrets every error, but it applauds the integrity
of a writer who volunteers a correction of his or her own
published story. Whatever the origin, though, any complaint
should be relayed to a responsible supervising editor and
investigated quickly.
CASE STUDIES / SCENARIO
 1) You’re covering a traffic incident where a woman was killed.
Her husband arrived soon afterwards and you saw him.

 What do you do? Do you interview him?

 You may, if you think it’s absolutely necessary.
 But you MUST think about what you want to ask him.

 How are you feeling now? (STUPID QUESTION)

 What’s the woman’s background? (HEY! This man just lost his
wife! Uneccessary Q)

 My take:
 I most likely won’t interview him. Just observe his emotions
from some distance and see if he’d say anything himself.
 If I must approach him, show respect, show care, say you’re
sorry for his loss; you want to help; give him your card; tell
him to contact you if he needs help pursuing justice for his
wife. If he doesn’r want to talk, walk away.
I was one of the reporters waiting outside the gov building where
family members of victims were having a meeting. How did I
approach them?
 2) The mother of a man who has been in the spotlight of a
controversy in HK contacted me. She told me a big story. But
after the interview, she told me not to write about it.

 What would you do? Will you still write about it or not?
 I did not.

 Why?

 It’s not about the family committing a crime. There’s no

“overriding public interests”.

 To me, it’s a news story. To them, it’s their lives.

 Running the article could completely ruin their lives.

 3) You interviewed a company CEO. He asked you to send him
a copy of the article before it’s published.

 Should you?
 No you can’t.

 Can’t let your interviewee decide what you publish.

 Ask interviewee why he wants to see the story before it’s

published. Tell him if he just wants to make sure it’s accurate,
you have the conversations recorded and you will listen back to
the recording to make sure all is accurate.

 If he insists, then you have a tough decision to make. I may

tell him that, fine, then we won’t publish the story at all. But
you need to think about if you want to ruin your relation with
him.
 4) You interviewed a politician / government official.
After the interview, he suddenly asked to be quoted off-
the-record. What do you do?
 Ask yourself: why would he ask to be quoted off the record?
 Does he simply fear he will lose his job?

 Does he have ulterior motive? For example, if he just trying

to “spin” the story so the controversy looks less embarassing
for the gov?
 If the interviewee claim that the government official did not
do anything bad, can he provide proof? A document? Emails?
SOCIETY OF PROFESSIONAL
JOURNALISTS
 https://www.spj.org/ethicscasestudies.asp
 1) Who’s the Predator?

 2) Publishing Drunk Drivers’ Photos

 3) Cooperating with the government