Acting ethically as a journalist or content creator is one of the main ways we can gain trust from our audiences, so understanding what we can do to achieve this is crucial to this accreditation. Here, we will learn what the public need from the media to gain trust, and think about how we can navigate subjectivity, objectivity, and bias to be trusted information providers.

Learning Objectives

• Understand what the public need in order to build trust with your audience
• Understand the importance of due impartiality, and if it can be achieved

Sub-topics

2.1. How can you gain trust with your audience
2.2. How can you navigate biases? Balance and objectivity

Practical Applications

Gaining expertise in building audience trust will improve and maintain your readership levels, reversing the crisis of public trust that threatens career sustainability. Implementing transparent practices and learning to navigate biases effectively helps you avoid credibility erosion that makes your job far more difficult when people mistrust you and your work.

Let’s examine the principles and behaviours media creators should embody to produce truthful content. This module considers ethical principles of truth, such as the importance of accuracy, examines the behaviours that media creators need to enact to be accurate, such as attribution, copyright, and providing a right to reply, and the consequences of what happens when we deviate from truth, namely, when we make untrue allegations about a person (vis-à-vis defamation).

Learning Objectives

• Understand the importance of accuracy and how to be balanced
• Understand how to credit people for their contributions
• Understand the importance of defamation in your role, and the ways to avoid defaming people

Sub-topics

3.1. What is truth?
3.2. Why is accurate reporting important?
3.3. What are attribution and plagiarism, copyright, and the right to reply?
3.4. What is defamation?

Practical Applications

Understanding defamation law and accurate reporting practices protects your career from costly legal trouble and accusations that could end your journalism practice. Learning through case studies and real examples helps you develop fact-checking routines and verification skills, enabling you to stand behind your work when criticised.

This module introduces some of the latest technologies and ethical issues, influencing what we write, produce, share or publish.

Learning Objectives

• Know how to look for and spot mis- and disinformation
• Know how to use open-source tools to fact check
• Understand the uses and impacts of Artificial Intelligence

Sub-topics

4.1. What is misinformation and disinformation? 
4.2. How can I use social media ethically? 
4.3. Using AI when producing media  

Practical Applications

Mastering the detection of misinformation and disinformation alongside ethical AI use is crucial for maintaining your credibility in an era of constant fake news circulation that threatens journalism as a whole. Through case studies and discussion points, you’ll develop company policies and verification techniques that protect your reporting from being discredited, avoiding reputational damage from inadvertently spreading false information.

Breaching privacy has been one of the hottest topics in journalism since the start of the 21st century. In this module, we will take a closer look at issues surrounding privacy, instances where journalists have acted unethically and the practicalities of carrying out investigative journalism while navigating privacy rights.

Learning Objectives

• Understand your responsibility as a media creator to abide by privacy laws
• Gain an understanding of the consequences of acting unethically when reporting on private issues
• Understand the benefits of ethical reporting whereby privacy is concerned, and how to abide by the Standards Code

Sub-topics

5.1. What is privacy?
5.2. How can I be ethical when considering privacy?
5.3. How can I protect personal data?
5.4. Doing investigative journalism ethically

Practical Applications

Understanding privacy rights, laws, and data protection ensures you avoid legal ramifications that could derail your journalism career while still conducting powerful investigative work. Learning the ‘right way’ through practical examples helps you build lasting source relationships and protect yourself from privacy breaches, securing your ability to publish important stories without facing career-ending legal consequences that bring journalism into disrepute.

To many, one of the most important functions for a content creator is to not only inform your community but to represent them. In this module, we hear from experts on discrimination in the news, how you can engage with your communities and the importance of accessible content.

Learning Objectives

• Understand what staff and story diversity in journalism is, and what it can bring to you and your organisation
• Learn how to respect and represent the diversity of your community
• Learn how to adopt best practice in language use

Sub-topics

6.1. What is discrimination?
6.2. Why is community engagement important?
6.3. How can your work be inclusive and accessible?
6.4. How can equity be achieved in media creation?

Practical Applications

Learning how to ethically engage with communities builds lasting relationships and trust that are essential for your long-term success, helping you appeal to the widest possible audience. Emphasising inclusivity, accessibility, and equity in your reporting prevents you from alienating communities through insensitive coverage, protecting your career from the backlash that comes from failing to understand those you cover.

Throughout your career as a journalist, there may come a time when you have to report on sensitive issues. While it is important to give coverage to a story no matter the topic, there are good ways and bad ways to go about your newsgathering or content creation. Here, you will find out more about reporting on trauma, grief, suicide, mental health, sexual assault, disabilities and more.

Learning Objectives

• Understand the importance of care when producing media about vulnerable communities
• Understand different vulnerable groups and use best practice in reporting
• Create a personal process to take care of your own wellbeing and resilience

Sub-topics

7.1. How should I report on trauma and grief?
7.2. How should I report on mental health?
7.3. How should I report on suicide and self harm? 
7.4. How should I report on sexual assault and domestic violence? 
7.5. How should I report on children and young people? 
7.6. How should I report on disabilities? 
7.7. How should I report on legal cases? 

Practical Applications

Equipping yourself with increased care when reporting on traumatic experiences protects vulnerable people in your stories and your own mental wellbeing. Through lived experience case studies, you’ll learn from other reporters’ mistakes and understand best practices, preventing you from re-traumatising sources and causing harm that damages your professional standing, ensuring the people you report on feel respected rather than exploited by your journalism.

So, you and your fellow journalists have learned more about carrying out your roles in an ethical way! But publishers are more than just those writing the stories. In this module we look at other important ethical practices to bear in mind, including environmental issues, advertising and alternative business models.

Learning Objectives

• Be able to evaluate how distinct your commercial and editorial principles are – question how it influences your editorial
• Understand the ethical dilemmas of producing content based on personal finances and choices as an editor or journalist
• Be able to evaluate commercial relationships in order to tease out ethical dilemmas and increase transparency
• Understand how to evaluate commercial activity and ethics

Sub-topics

8.1. Building an ethical organisation 
8.2. Why does ethical advertising matter? 
8.3. Should we use cookies? 
8.4. What happens when content, commercial, and ethics collide? 
8.5. Why are ‘reader revenues’ back? 
8.6. What should we do about environmental issues?
8.7. Are there alternative business models?

Practical Applications

This module gives you tools to enact organisational change by expanding your thinking on environmental considerations and alternative business models that strengthen media sustainability. Working through ethical business practices and structures for action helps you avoid conflicts of interest and commercial pressures that compromise editorial integrity, preventing your journalism from becoming just another advertorial that erodes audience trust.

It is important that you are now able to take forward what you have learned into the real world. In this module, we will help guide you on ways in which you can do just that.

Sub-topics

9.1. What should I do if I receive a complaint? 
9.2. Bringing it all together  
9.3. Your ethical framework in practice 

Practical Applications

Deploying a complaints process for your readers and completing your ethical framework empowers you to handle criticism professionally while demonstrating accountability that strengthens audience trust in your work. Learning practical ways to receive and respond to complaints, including the Impress complaints procedure, helps you avoid defensive reactions, ensuring you can upskill your practice to become more ethical and maintain the credibility needed to defend your work throughout your career.