For a century, journalists have had a voluntary ethics code. Editors are giving it an AI-era reboot

NEW YORK (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’ 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.

“I’m going to just say it,” says Axelrod, chairman of the SPJ Ethics Committee and former longtime Gannett business reporter. ”This is the way to protect democracy. This is to protect society. There but for the grace of God goes a society without journalists.”

Axelrod is talking not only about the existence of the code but the need, every so often, to update it.

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