Favoritism vs news judgment

When assessing content, if you must think too long about whether something is fair, then it probably is not, and you should redirect your energy into making it fair. Fairness has to do with being aware of and attentive to nuances, treating people with respect, and anticipating perceptions that readers will take away with them. […]

Encore: Why you need to think of ethics

Some things are just worth repeating. So we offer a previously published post — “Needed: Everyone to Think about Ethics.” Originally published last fall, the key takeaways are that you can tell a lot about strangers by the way they drive, and you can tell a lot about people by how they handle situations involving […]

Fun? Absolutely — but act carefully

Your audience does not draw neat lines between the personal you and the working you, whether you are self-employed or receive a paycheck from someone else. Twitter has become a particular hazard, where 140-character potshots that are meant to be funny can backfire. Do these tweets showcase humor and sharp-edged sarcasm, or reveal a bias […]

Needed: Everyone to think about ethics

For roughly the past 30 days, we have taken our own advice, which we wrote in our last blog post: It’s acceptable to have an unexpressed thought. We have not posted to this blog since that entry. During that time, we thought each day about what we might write. But, we also were well aware […]