Sunday, July 17, 2011

Reuters pulling its handbook from public view?

Reuters publishes online, a 500+ page "Handbook of Journalism" which lays out the agency's guiding ethical principles for its journalists:
Everything we do as Reuters journalists has to be independent, free from bias and executed with the utmost integrity. These are our core values and stem from the Reuters Trust Principles. As a real-time, competitive news service whose reputation rests on reliability, we also value accuracy, speed and exclusivity. The way in which we, as Reuters employees, live these values is governed by the Reuters Code of Conduct. That code, with a few notable exceptions that apply specifically to journalists, governs the behaviour of all Reuters employees and is essential reading. As journalists, however, we have additional responsibilities if we are to fulfil the highest aspirations of our profession - to search for and report the truth, fairly, honestly and unfailingly.
We frequently refer and link to relevant sections of the Handbook to demonstrate how Reuters correspondents fail miserably to honor their own professed standards and values.

For nearly a week, the Handbook has been unavailable online with the following glitch message appearing for all handbook.reuters.com links:
Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_NAMESPACE, expecting T_STRING in E:\webs\handbookofjournalism\includes\Namespace.php on line 44
For those readers wishing to reference the Reuters Handbook, it is cached by Scribd here.

We shall be linking to the cached version until Reuters corrects its "parse" and "syntax" error.

1 comment:

  1. Please put this on Google Docs so people can download the handbook without having to register.

    ReplyDelete