- Core principles shared by journalists across media & cultures
- New material on the rise of social media, challenges facing printed news, journalism's purpose in the digital age

Our new media landscape of social networking, blogging, and interactivity has forever changed how media content is produced and distributed. Choices about how to gather, evaluate and publish information are ever more complex. This blurring of boundaries between general public values and the values of media professionals has made media ethics an essential issue for media professionals, but also demonstrates how it must be intrinsically part of the wider public conversation. This book teaches students to navigate ethical questions in a digital society and apply ethical concepts and guidelines to their own practice. Using case studies, judgement call boxes and further reading, Understanding Media Ethics clarifies the moral concepts in media contexts, and enables students to apply them to practical decision making through real-life worked examples. Covering key topics such as media freedoms, censorship, privacy, standards, taste, regulation, codes of practice and the ethics of representation, this is an essential guide for students in journalism, media, communication and public relations. 

Ethics in communication and media has arguably reached a pivotal stage of maturity in the last decade, moving from disparate lines of inquiry to a theory-driven, interdisciplinary field presenting normative frameworks and philosophical explications for communicative practices. The intent of this volume is to present this maturation, to reflect the vibrant state of ethics theorizing and to illuminate promising pathways for future research.

Social media is at the core of digital transformations in organizations. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other social media platforms widen the scope for rapid and effective communication with stakeholders. They also create a range of new and challenging ethical dilemmas. This open access book categorizes the dilemmas organizations across a range of industries can face when they implement social media to communicate with stakeholders.

Herman Wasserman explores the ethics of the media in conflicts that arise during transitions to democracy in Africa. He examines the roles, responsibilities, and obligations of media in contexts of high socioeconomic inequality. In doing so, he looks at ethnic and racial polarization in the histories of colonialism, post-colonial authoritarianism, and hybrid regimes. Taking a critical view of the normative guidelines and professional identities of journalism inherited from contexts outside of Africa, he argues that a more reciprocal and collaborative approach is needed. He develops a new ethics of engagement that would require the media to facilitate the resolution of conflicts across differences of ethnicity, citizenship, and class.

Ethics for a Digital Era provides a penetrating analysis of the ethical issues that have emerged as the digital revolution progresses, including journalistic practices that impact on the truth, reliability, and trustworthiness of communicating information. The volume explores new methods and models for ethical inquiry in a digital world, and maps out guidelines for web-based news producers and users to conceptualize ethical issues and analyze ethically questionable acts. In each of three thematic sections, Deni Elliott and Edward H. Spence reflect upon shifts in media ethics as contemporary mass communication combines traditional analog practices with new forms like blogs, vlogs, podcasts, and social media posts, and evolves into an interactive medium with users who both produce and consume the news. Later chapters apply a process of normative decision-making to some of the most important issues which arise in these interactions, and encourage users to bridge their own thinking between the virtual and physical worlds of information and its communication.

This new edition of a well-regarded, student-friendly textbook for journalism ethics has been extensively revised and updated to meet the needs of the 21st century journalist working in the digital age. Educates aspiring journalists on ethical decision-making, with coverage of key applied issues such as the principles of fairness and accuracy, the duty of verification, the role of social media, the problems of plagiarism, fabrication, and conflicts of interest, business issues that affect journalism ethics, and questions relating to source relationships, privacy, and deception in reporting.