Ethics Decision Flowchart — Privacy, Consent and Verification Before Publication
Editorial ethics failures are rarely a single bad decision. They are a sequence in which each step looked defensible in isolation, and nobody walked the whole chain from private information through consent to verification before the piece went out.
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Ethics Decision Flowchart
Answer the questions below to check whether your story is ready for publication from an ethical and legal standpoint.
Question 1 of 8
Does your story involve private or personal information about an individual?
How it works
- It walks a decision tree one question at a time: does the story involve private or personal information; is there a clear public interest justification; does it involve children or vulnerable individuals; were covert methods used; were all parties given a fair opportunity to respond; are key facts verified with at least two independent sources; are anonymity promises protected; and have you checked for active proceedings and reporting restrictions.
- Answers route you down different branches, so no two runs ask the same eight questions. Answering “no” to the public interest question when private information is involved stops the run immediately at a red Privacy Risk verdict without asking anything else.
- There are eight terminal verdicts: one green “Proceed with Publication”, three amber cautions (children and vulnerable persons, covert methods, source protection) and four red stops (privacy, fairness, accuracy, legal risk).
- Six of the eight verdicts name a specific provision — Editors’ Code Clause 1 for accuracy, Clause 2 for privacy, Clause 6 for children, Clause 10 for clandestine devices and subterfuge, Clause 14 for confidential sources, and the Contempt of Court Act 1981 for the legal-risk branch. The green and fairness verdicts reference the Editors’ Code only in general terms, with no clause number attached.
- A back button reverses one step at a time, so you can change an answer and see where the branch goes instead.
When to use it
- On a story you are uneasy about but cannot articulate why — the tree surfaces which of the eight axes is the problem.
- When briefing a junior reporter or a student on a sensitive assignment, as a shared sequence to walk together.
- Before a story involving a child, where the amber verdict is a prompt to escalate rather than a clearance.
- When covert recording or subterfuge is being proposed and the “no other means” justification needs testing.
- As the last check before filing, to confirm that reporting restrictions were actually looked for rather than assumed absent.
What it does not do
- Not legal advice, and a green verdict is not clearance to publish. It means eight questions were answered favourably by you, in your own judgement, about a story it has never seen.
- The tree is short-circuiting by design, so a red verdict early on means the later questions — including the one about reporting restrictions and contempt — were never asked at all. A privacy stop tells you nothing about your legal exposure.
- Each question is a single binary on a judgement that is rarely binary. “Is there a clear public interest justification” is exactly the question that is hard, and answering “yes” here does not make it so.
- It cannot see whether an order exists, whether your two sources are genuinely independent, or whether identifying detail about a confidential source has survived in your copy or its metadata.
- It reflects the Editors’ Code and IMPRESS standards for the press. Broadcast output is regulated by the Ofcom Broadcasting Code, which is structured differently and asks different questions.
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