The University of Wisconsin-Madison held a one-day conference on Friday 30 April 2010 that put a single question to working journalists and academics: do new forms of media require new standards, or do established ethical principles still apply? “New Journalism, New Ethics?” was hosted by the Center for Journalism Ethics at the university’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication, ran a session specifically on social media ethics for journalists, and streamed its sessions for those who could not travel to Madison.
Ahead of the conference the ethics centre released Ethics for the New Investigative Newsroom, a report summarising a roundtable on nonprofit journalism held at UW-Madison that January. Stephen Ward, the centre’s director, used his introduction to argue that the funding model was itself an ethical question. Nonprofit journalism, he wrote, “changes the way journalism is done; alters its economic base; and develops new linkages between journalists, funders, and audience”. The new centres tended to be multimedia and collaborative, drawing together different types of journalist; they were smaller than most mainstream newsrooms and dependent on fewer funders, often a single major foundation. The consequence Ward drew out was proximity: in a nonprofit newsroom “the distance between journalist and funder” is reduced.
Nonprofit newsrooms were multiplying in the US as the conference met, which made that proximity a practical problem for editors rather than a theoretical one.