For a Century, Journalists Have Had a Voluntary Ethics Code. Editors Are Giving it An AI-era Reboot
The SPJ believes these updates are crucial for maintaining journalistic integrity in a rapidly changing industry.
NEW YORK, Sept. 1, 2026 (AP) — Walk into a corner of a newsroom somewhere and you can often find it affixed to a bulletin board, perhaps peeking out from behind the coffee pot: the Society of Professional Journalists’s Code of Ethics. It’s less than a thousand words, fitting neatly on a poster.
But those words — organized around four key journalistic principles — are important enough, asserts Dan Axelrod, that they just might save our democracy.
