Laws, Ethics, and
News Literacy
In the ODYSSEY's introductory class, veteran leaders taught students like myself about the basics of journalism laws and ethics, while pointing out the importance of absorbing news content as readers. I still consider and apply these same principles to my work today.
Navigating Ethical Dilemmas
In the course of my four years on staff at the ODYSSEY, I've had to navigate my share of ethical dilemmas. Having gone through a foundational training in journalism ethics, based on the Society of Professional Journalists' Code of Ethics and various ethical rationales like The Golden Mean and utilitarianism, I've worked to resolve these dilemmas in a way that reflects well on both the ODYSSEY program and the affected stakeholder. I always approach these issues from a solutions-oriented perspective, allowing stakeholders to feel heard while ensuring I'm retaining the integrity of the ODYSSEY's work. These are a couple of ethical dilemmas that stand out most to me:
The Weight of the Scale stakeholders
In the course of my four years on staff at the ODYSSEY, I've had to navigate my share of ethical dilemmas. Having gone through a foundational training in journalism ethics, based on the Society of Professional Journalists' Code of Ethics and various ethical rationales like The Golden Mean and utilitarianism, I've worked to resolve these dilemmas in a way that reflects well on both the ODYSSEY program and the affected stakeholder. I always approach these issues from a solutions-oriented perspective, allowing stakeholders to feel heard while ensuring I'm retaining the integrity of the ODYSSEY's work. These are a couple of ethical dilemmas that stand out most to me:
Navigating Social Media Blowback on Political Content
On multiple posts regarding our political content, the ODYSSEY Instagram account got blown up by commenters accusing us of bias and unfair reporting. The two instances were a video of the Team Trump bus tour dancing to Y.M.C.A in Athens and a post-election editorial I wrote offering a frank assessment of the state of the country from my perspective. In the former case, students and community members alike flamed us for giving the Republican delegation a spotlight and “promoting” them, while with my editorial, a few commenters took issue with my take on then-President-elect Trump’s election. In spite of the comments, we held firm, holding ourselves to our social media policy, which states that “The OMG allows anyone to engage with its social media accounts via liking, commenting and sharing. However, the OMG reserves the right to remove comments that violate any provisions for profanity, obscenity or inflammatory language hitherto outlined.” Only the inflammatory comments were removed, allowing the dissemination of free speech without giving room for misinformation or hate.
Navigating the CCSD Interview Policy
Now in its second year, the Clarke County School District’s administrative interview policy has been a thorn in our side all year. The policy requires us to go through the CCSD Executive Director of Communications anytime we wish to interview a CCSD employee. This slows down our production time since we cannot reach out directly to our stakeholders, but after consultation with the Student Press Law Center, CCSD administrators, and our adviser, it’s a burden we’ve continued to shoulder. Under the journalistic ethical principle of “Minimize Harm,” we’ve avoided circumventing the policy in order to maintain strong relationships with our stakeholders.
Athens Dance Studios Parent Complaint
After the ODYSSEY published a multimedia package highlighting two dance studios in Athens, we received a parent complaint. The parent, a mother of a child at one of the dance studios not spotlighted, claimed that we were not doing enough to balance our coverage by not including her daughter’s studio in our coverage. After reading the complaint, I assessed things on our end alongside the writer and our Digital Editor, determining that her claim that we didn’t even mention the studio did not bear true. The package, we decided, was never meant to provide a holistic understanding of all dance studios, nor did we claim it would – it was simply a snapshot of two. Even then, on the embedded map, the one piece of multimedia that did claim to show all studios, the parent’s studio was presented as well. I communicated all of this in a respectful, professional email to the parent, who thanked us for the clarity.
Checklists
There’s a checklist for pretty much every story that we write in the ODYSSEY. These checklists outline the requirements for any story to be published, going into detail about what the standard for each element needs to be. By using checklists with boxes such as “completed transcription” and “uploaded audio,” I can make sure I’m acting ethically as a journalist and hold members of staff accountable when they’re not.
Fact-Checking
At first, fact-checking was something I struggled with as a journalist. I lacked the ability to recognize when I needed specific information in an interview, so I was constantly having to reach back out to confirm details. That still sometimes happens, but I’ve gotten a lot better at noticing when I need to confirm something in an interview – of course, I still go back behind the stakeholder and double check with other pertinent sources.
Shattered Glass
In Journalism I, we watched the film “Shattered Glass,” which showed the story of New Republic journalist Stephen Glass’s downfall after rival outlets proved he had been fabricating his stories. Our adviser asked us to respond to Glass’s behavior, noting specifically when he had breached the Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics and why his behavior was unethical.
Corrections and Omissions
After each issue of the ODYSSEY newsmagazine is published, we go back over the old magazine and look for errors – these could be formatting, grammatical, or anything that is out of place. When we find these, we put them in a document with the specific location of the error and publish this list in the next issue of the magazine. I did some corrections for the second issue of the magazine, which helped hold ourselves accountable for mistakes we made.
Diversity of Sources
Being ethical and reporting on a diverse array of topics and sources go hand in hand – if I’m not doing one, then I’m not doing the other. When I pitch stories, I always ask myself two questions: if it is something the average CCHS student cares about and if it accurately represents the CCHS community. If the answer to either is no, then the story is scrapped.
Conference Notes
I’ve attended sessions at the Georgia Scholastic Press Association and Southern Interscholastic Press Association on the importance of journalism ethics and law. These sessions showed me what ethics means outside of the high school setting, when much information is easily available and the stakes are relatively low.
Ensuring Ethical Journalism
Student Press Corps
In 2024, I joined the Student Press Corps, a group of students under the tutelage of Vanderbilt University Professor Amanda Little. The organization, which encompasses student-produced publications like the Students United News Network and Watch Us Rise!, has a Teen Advisory Board composed of top student journalists from around the country that run most of its operations.
Aggregating Student Work
From a news literacy perspective, the work I’ve been doing for the Student Press Corps has been all about aggregating the most powerful stories and repackaging them to a broader audience. Of the SPC’s publication cohort, composed of 100+ high school news publications, I’ve combed through their websites several times to find content that I feel needs to be elevated on a national stage. When I do this, I consider a couple things. First, the quality of the article: if the writing is especially strong, then simply by virtue of being high quality journalism, people would benefit from it. Second, if the topic is especially important at that moment, then I’ll choose it for its news values: prominence and timeliness.
A graphic I made to debut the Student United News Network Instagram page.
This was a post I made synthesizing a student journalist's article about how President-elect Donald Trump might impact education in the country.
I created this reel to promote the repackaged 2024 Election Package published on the ODYSSEY website.
A graphic I made to debut the Student United News Network Instagram page.
Sharing Student Work
This work doesn’t just go into the void, though. I serve on the social media side of the Teen Advisory Board, meaning I’m creating content to promote and distribute the SPC’s work. The account is still in its infancy, limiting its tangible impact and analytics, but the work is important. By establishing a baseline for what posts will look like, I’m setting the standard for what future content should look like and hopefully growing an audience of engaged young people along the way.
Internship Research
Separate from the ODYSSEY classroom again, my interest in journalism ethics led me to an internship with University of Georgia professor Dr. David Welch Suggs, who works at the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication. There were two main facets to the internship: my work on site with Dr. Suggs and self-directed research on the side. Each experience was unique in my understanding of journalism in a changing world.
Self-directed Research
While my work with Dr. Suggs examined journalism through a workforce lens, my personal research was more attuned to my job. For the class, I was required to pick a research question and find 12 scholarly articles that could help us begin to find an answer. I thoroughly annotated each article and summarized it in a rhetorical precis, while my work culminated in a 7-page final research paper. My question: what is the intersection between journalism ethics and audience engagement and how can journalists balance the two concepts in their work? With scholarly articles written by professors from Finland to Peru, I walked away with a more foundational understanding of what audience engagement means for journalism ethics even as the platforms journalism exists on change. The conclusion I presented in my final paper was that the drive to audience engagement was not flawed, but the tactics to do so were: by forcing media into a “who can do this the fastest and most eye-catchingly” game, publications damage their own integrity while not giving their readers a holistic, accurate picture of the story. I argued that audience engagement should be sought after another way, ideally by getting buy-in from people for their full attention through things like live journalism.
Site Research
With Dr. Suggs, my research focused on a non-cognitive study he was pursuing. The question he aimed to answer was this: are colleges and universities teaching students the skills they need to succeed in the professional world? The instrument was a survey, in which respondents – all media professionals – were asked to rate the importance of several non-cognitive skills (openness, adaptability, etc.) in their jobs while comparing that to a rating of how well their higher education experience taught them those skills. My work specifically focused on building and editing the survey to ensure it was ready for respondents, distributing the survey to a list of respondents, and doing rudimentary data analysis to identify conclusions. What we found was that, in a changing and increasingly digital media landscape, there were many skills media professionals felt they needed more than they were effectively taught, giving universities insight into how they could further their educational opportunities. The research article, of which I am a co-author, will be published in the Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media.