Wednesday, May 14, 2008

Ethics and the Contest

One of the guiding principals of the Society of Professional Journalists is ethics. If people can't trust that we're not reporting and writing the truth as we know it, why should the public trust us.

To read SPJ's Code of Ethics, click here.

I bring this up because the entries in our contest should be held to the ethical standards of the business. If you made a mistake in a story that you're going to enter, the correction (if one ran) should be attached to the story as well.

As such, when I got an e-mail this morning, I was pleased that one of my journalistic colleagues was so bound to his ethics that months after his story ran, and just a few days after he received an award, that when two mistakes were discovered in the story yesterday (one, the person said was "a particularly egregious error"), he withdrew his story from the contest and returned the award.

The winner's list has been updated below, and replacement awards for the other people in the category will be made and sent out in the coming weeks.

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