Dean Wright is Global Editor, Ethics, Innovation and News Standards. Any opinions are his own.

The first entry is abattoir (not abbatoir); the last is ZULU (a term used by Western military forces to mean GMT).

In between are 2,211 additional entries in the A-to-Z general style guide, part of the Reuters Handbook of Journalism, which we are now making available online. Also included in the handbook are sections on standards and values; a guide to operations; a sports style guide and a section of specialised guidance on such issues as personal investments by journalists, dealing with threats and complaints and reporting information found on the internet.

The handbook is the guidance Reuters journalists live by — and we’re proud of it. Until now, it hasn’t been freely available to the public. In the early 1990s, a printed handbook was published and in 2006 the Reuters Foundation published a relatively short PDF online that gave some basic guidance to reporters. But it’s only now that we’re putting the full handbook online.

We’ve decided to make the handbook available to everyone for a number of reasons. Among them:

• Transparency: At a time when trust is an endangered commodity in the financial and media worlds, it’s important that news consumers see the guidelines our journalists follow.
• Service: As we’ve seen over the past decade, the barriers to publishing have dropped so that anyone with an idea and a computer can be a publisher. But it’s also become clear that publishers have a varying standard of truth, fairness and style. Our handbook is a good place for budding journalists to begin.
• Geography: Reuters serves a global audience and the handbook recognises the cultural and political differences that our journalists face in reporting for the world. This is a handbook not just for English-language journalists in the United Kingdom or the United States, but for wherever English is used.

Many entries deal with words that are sometimes confused or misused. Turning randomly to the “H” section, we learn the difference between hyperthermia and hypothermia (The latter means “Too cold. Think that o rhymes with low” while the former means “Too hot. Think of ‘er’ as in very.”); Haarlem and Harlem (the latter is in New York City, the former in the Netherlands); hangar and hanger (the latter is for clothes, the former a shelter for aircraft); and hale and hail (the former means “free from disease, or to pull or haul by force.” The latter “is to salute or call out, or an ice shower”).

We take a global approach to the spelling of many words. Often, it’s the United States against the world. For instance, our preferred style is “artefact,” except in the U.S., where it’s artifact. Same goes for axe and axeing — our standards for most of the world — which become ax and axing in the U.S. There’s also “backwards,” which loses its “s” in American stories, and “leukaemia,” which loses that first “a” in the U.S. There’s plenty more: tyre and tire, titbit and tidbit, and defence and defense.

In the world of diplomacy, economics and academe, the G3 is Germany, Japan and the U.S.; the G5 extends membership to France and the U.K.; G7 grows the club to Canada and Italy; make it G8 with Russia; G10 adds Belgium, the Netherlands and Sweden. As for the G24, G30 and G77, you’ll have to look for yourself (we’ve got entries for them, too).

There are slang words to avoid (posh — though one former Spice Girl might object) and a number of common misspellings (Viet Cong, not Vietcong; ventricle, not ventrical; machinegun, not machine gun; and ketchup, not catchup or catsup).

The sports section of the handbook offers a list of sports cliches to avoid (hard fought, made history, veteran, bounce back, and icon), the difference between a field and a pitch (the former’s where American football and baseball are played), and an explanation of delight as a transitive verb that needs an object (”Marat Safin delighted Russian fans with a neat chip…not Marat Safin delighted with a chip.”). Words like disaster and tragedy shouldn’t be used in sports stories, as this devalues the significance of these words (”Losing a football match is not a disaster. A stand falling down and crushing a fan is”).

When language implies a value judgment, we must use words very carefully (cult, for instance: One person’s cult is another’s religion). The entry for “good, bad” advises: “For financial and commodity markets good news and bad news depends on who you are and what your position is in the market. Avoid them.”

One of the most controversial entries is that of “terrorism.” The entry reads, in part:

“We may refer without attribution to terrorism and counter-terrorism in general but do not refer to specific events as terrorism. Nor do we use the adjective word terrorist without attribution to qualify specific individuals, groups or events. … Report the subjects of news stories objectively, their actions, identity and background. Aim for a dispassionate use of language so that individuals, organisations and governments can make their own judgment on the basis of facts. Seek to use more specific terms like “bomber” or “bombing”, “hijacker” or “hijacking”, “attacker” or “attacks”, “gunman” or “gunmen” etc.”

This policy has been passionately debated inside and outside Reuters. As  the handbook says, “we aim for dispassionate language” so that our customers can “make their own judgment on the basis of facts.”

Reuters Editor-in-Chief David Schlesinger puts it this way:

“Over the years we have been criticised for this policy on numerous occasions, when people or governments wanted us to label an incident ourselves rather than quote their views. Criticism of our policy was especially fierce when the United States was attacked on Sept. 11, 2001. Reuters made the decision not to describe the attackers as terrorists, because we thought a label would not add to our vivid description of the thousands of deaths and the destruction of the iconic twin towers of the World Trade Center. In the years since, as the world has witnessed numerous other attacks, we’ve chosen to continue that policy of sticking with the facts and letting our readers make up their own minds based on our reporting and the evidence we present them.”

It’s important to point out that the handbook is a living document, one that preserves rules that have guided Reuters journalists through a century and half but also one that may change when the times change.  It’s also important to note that the handbook is produced by humans who aren’t infallible — and it’s used by humans who aren’t infallible, so sometimes we make mistakes. I’m sure you’ll let us know when we do, but we’re usually harder on ourselves than anyone else is.

I hope you’ll find the handbook useful, whether you’re a journalist, a student, a teacher or an engaged reader. And we welcome your comments and suggestions.

Dean Wright is Global Editor, Ethics, Innovation and News Standards. Any opinions are his own.

Are we too connected?

In recent days and weeks I’ve been wondering if our mobile phones, Blackberries, text messaging and constant access to email and social media have brought us too close together for our own good.

Or maybe the quality of our connected life is only as good as the information we share.

At this point, social media and microblogging phenomena like Facebook and Twitter focus on short answers to such generic questions as, “What are you doing?”

We hear from network and cable television anchors who tell us what they’re having for lunch (often a quick sandwich in the company cafeteria because they are, well, really busy). Or from usually cynical White House journalists who can’t resist Tweeting which B-list celebrity they saw at the White House Correspondents Dinner. Here are a few actual Tweets from the so-called nerd prom:

• “Just spend quality time with ricky schroeder #nerdprom”.
• “post #nerdprom sightings. demi/ashton, james franco, owen wilson, eric holder, mayor fente, d axelrod, christopher hitchens, dana delaney”. (This one’s fitting since Ashton Kutcher is the world’s most followed Twitterer).
• “Just got picture with Dule Hill.”

Given the quality of the material, it’s little wonder that a Nielsen study found that Twitter retained only 40 percent of its new members after a month of use. And that was after Oprah started sharing her 140-character thoughts. Before that it was 30 percent.

But could it be that this “me, me, me” quality of Facebook and Twitter is just an early evolutionary stage of something smarter and more useful? There are some encouraging signs — and that’s a good thing, because we’re becoming ever more connected.

How connected are we?

• Facebook has more than 200 million active users and more than 100 million log on at least once a day. More than 3.5 billion minutes a day are spent on Facebook and more than 20 million users update their statuses at least once a day.
• A Nielsen survey found that American teenagers sent and received an average of 2,272 text messages a month in the last quarter of 2008, an astonishing 80 messages a day. That’s more than double the previous year’s figures and works out to more than three messages an hour — if they never sleep or go to class.

How connected are we going to be?

• Delta Airlines reported that more than 300 of its aircraft will be equipped with wi-fi this year, enabling email users to stay connected — or shackled — to their accounts even seven miles above the earth. Other airlines are closely watching Delta’s experience.

Media outlets and other institutions are finding ways to take advantage of this connectivity, moving beyond gossip and gab.

• ProPublica recently introduced Change Tracker, an application that monitors government websites and sends out notices of changes as they are posted via a Twitter feed. Some of the changes are a bit obscure — “Biography of Millard Fillmore [rare] changed on 5/27″ — but others track changes to the website following the spending of economic stimulus money.
• The Vatican has added an iPhone app to reach out to young, connected people, according to Online Media Daily. Young people “are looking to a different media culture, and this is our effort to ensure that the Church is present in that communications culture,” said Monsignor Paul Tighe, secretary of the Vatican’s Social Communications department.
• At Reuters, we’re using Reuters Messenger to build chat rooms in which our journalists can expand their conversation with the marketplace through informal, dynamic interactions with a group of engaged financial news clients on our terminals.

We’re also using Twitter in some intriguing ways:

• Specialist journalists use it to share articles and build up a following.
• Online editorial staff and bloggers use Twitter to distribute news and solicit reader comment.
• Journalists are using Twitter during live events like Davos (Editor-in-Chief David Schlesinger used it to break news there earlier this year) and to solicit questions for newsmaker interviews.

There are huge implications for those of us in the news media as we try to reach an increasingly fragmented and distracted audience awash in information, some of it wanted and much of it not.

And journalists who work and live in the digital world (and that’s just about all of us now) will find that there is little or no difference between our professional and private personae in the wide-open world of social media. A visit to my Facebook page, for example, would reveal to my friends that I have a strong interest in horse racing; an affection for the New York Yankees (an obsession, my wife would argue); and take great pleasure in the words and music of Leonard Cohen, Bruce Springsteen and Townes Van Zandt. What you won’t find is an indication of my politics or religion.

Here at Reuters, we are developing guidelines for how our journalists interact with social media.

• If Reuters journalists want to use Twitter or social media as part of their professional role they should seek the permission of their manager.
• If Reuters journalists use Twitter professionally they should use the word “Reuters” in the name of their streams or somewhere else on the page.
• The Trust Principles apply to Twitter and social media — they should do nothing that compromises them.
• Microblogging and use of social media tend to blur the distinction between professional and personal lives: When using Twitter or social media in a professional capacity our journalists should aim to be personable but not to include irrelevant material about their personal lives.

In an email to the editorial staff, Editor-in-Chief Schlesinger told Reuters journalists, “whether we like it or not, our online identities are inextricably linked with our workplace identities….Things we do online could very easily taint our journalistic activity. If one of us self-identifies as ‘very liberal’ politically, it may well be the truth, but would advertising it simply feed the myth that journalists in general have a liberal bias?”

“The easiest rule,” Schlesinger cautioned, “is to stop, think and imagine: How would you feel and how would you react if someone made your Facebook page or blog or online comment a story? Could you defend your objectivity? Could Reuters defend having you on the beat you’re on? Could your reputation, and ours, survive someone making an issue of it?”

I’m sure neither Schlesinger nor I have had the last word on the relationship of journalism and social media, nor on whether we’re all too connected. What we need to pay attention to is the quality of those connections.

What do you think about how journalists are and should be using social media and microblogging? Let us know here — and don’t feel like you have to keep your thoughts to 140 characters.

Chris Cramer is Global Editor of Multimedia at Reuters News and has editorial oversight of Reuters Insider, a multimedia information service for Thomson Reuters financial service subscribers that will be launched this year.

Media organizations the world over are currently focusing on the future of their businesses. As audience and viewer attention fragments and the internet fuels a wholly different kind of information consumption there are many siren voices suggesting that traditional media business models are dead, or in some cases on life support. Rising print and distribution costs and flagging advertising are driving even flagship newspapers and magazines to slash their costs, jettison journalists and production staff, and in some cases, go entirely out of business. In Britain, television companies like ITV — once described as having a license to print money — are reconsidering their entire business rationale and, crucially, their future relationship with viewers and consumers.

Yet this week the world’s largest multimedia news agency, Reuters, unveils what we believe will be the future of news dissemination — not broadcasting, but narrowcasting.

Later this year we will launch the next-generation information service which will produce live markets coverage, analysis and breaking news for the financial professional — in this case the five hundred thousand institutional professionals currently subscribing to Thomson Reuters financial services.

The service — delivered exclusively via broadband internet — launches during the world’s most profound financial crisis in half a century, a story Reuters is throwing all its resources against, and will draw upon our huge global network of 2,500 journalists, almost 200 worldwide bureaus and writers and commentators from Thomson Reuters professional publications.

This is not the first time the news agency has launched a television service just for its clients. Reuters Financial TV went to market, delivered via bandwidth hungry data lines, in 1993. The service was then considered well ahead of its time and, though professional and highly-regarded by its customers, had excessive distribution costs. It stopped transmitting in 2001.

But Reuters has long held ambitions to return to the programming business and during the past year we have secretly planned for a return to narrowcasting. In record time we have built state of the art studios in London and New York and broadband transmission points in many of our overseas locations, including Hong Kong, Washington, Singapore and other global newsrooms. Sophisticated newsgathering tools are currently being installed in our bureaus and hundreds of staff are being equipped with Flip video cameras and other IP transmission technology. A production team of more than 100 journalists and technical staff has been hired, including television anchors such as Axel Threfall from CNBC and Carrie Lee from CNN and producers from other business channels like Bloomberg. Pilot programming has been available to selected clients and business partners since October last year.

The key to our success, we believe, is that our programming will not be linear — one programme after another — but will be vertical and will provide the kind of rich content and analysis our clients need. Not for them the breathless hype and audio visual tics associated with much of the business coverage currently available on broadcast and cable. We know through detailed user research that they want the facts, uncluttered and at a length they can cope with. Timely information and analysis in bite-sized chunks.

We plan to offer deep verticals of content relevant to our clients — ranging from Commodities and Energy to Emerging Markets to Islamic Finance. Each programme segment specifically targeted to what our clients and partners tell us they need to inform and enable them to make smarter business decisions.

But financial programming will be just a part of Reuters’ new service. The financial news and information service — code-named Reuters Insider — sits on a unique broadband media player which will also serve as an aggregation platform for third party content from traditional media companies.

The media player will be fully interactive, serving both live programming and video on demand. It is capable of advanced personalization — users can create their own channels and services — and will offer passage navigation, instant transcripts and the ability to search, select and send edited passages to friends and business clients. Video clips, market reports and analysis can also be sent to mobile devices such as Blackberry or iPhone for offline viewing. Users can communicate with Reuters’ programme makers and journalists in real time, creating a financial community and an array of information verticals not currently available in the media marketplace.

The media player will also serve as a first-to-market platform for individual Thomson Reuters market divisions such as Media, Sales and Trading, Investor A and Enterprise, enabling them to programme for staff and for customers.

We believe Reuters Insider is the future of news dissemination. Delivering focused, fast, intelligent and relevant information to make our clients and customers smarter and more successful.

Not broadcasting, but narrowcasting.

Dean Wright is Global Editor, Ethics, Innovation and News Standards. Any opinions are his own.

The president was inaugurated in front of adoring crowds and positive reviews in the media. As the unpopular incumbent sat on the platform with him, the new Democratic chief executive took office as the nation faced a crippling economic crisis. The incoming president was a charismatic figure who had run a brilliant campaign and had handled the press with aplomb. The media were ready to give him a break.

That was 1933, and in Franklin Roosevelt’s case, the media gave him a break.

For Barack Obama, the honeymoon was shorter.

Less than 36 hours after Obama took the oath of office, the White House denied news photographers access to the new president’s do-over swearing in, instead releasing official White House photos of the event. Reuters, The Associated Press and Agence France-Presse protested and refused to distribute the official photos (which nevertheless showed up on the websites of a number of large U.S. newspapers).

This is an important issue for news organisations, the public and for an administration that has promised a new era of transparency in doing the people’s business. How are people to know, for example, that the official photos haven’t been staged?

All U.S. administrations seek to manage the flow of information and the White House and the news media have a complex, interdependent relationship. Each needs the other. But it’s important that media organisations remember who’s most important.

For Howard Goller, Reuters editor for political and general news for the U.S. and Canada, it’s clear who’s most important.

“A news organisation’s first obligation is to its clients,” he says. “Our correspondents have a front-row seat at the White House, we ask questions at news conferences and briefings, and we travel with the president wherever he goes. Our photographers work just as hard for our customers. We became concerned when on taking office, the new administration prevented Reuters and other news organisations from taking our own photos. We’ve had several conversations with the new administration since those first days and we expect a more open relationship going forward.”

Most administrations get a bit of a honeymoon. Gallup polls show that every incoming, newly-elected president back to Dwight Eisenhower enjoyed majority approval ratings. Even the lowest-rated incoming presidents, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, had job approval ratings of 51 percent and disapproval ratings of only 13 percent and 6 percent, respectively.

Obama’s approval rating, 68 percent, was exceeded only by that of John F. Kennedy, who had a 72 percent rating. Even a plurality of Republicans—43 percent—give Obama positive marks.

The media have also generally been positive—or at least, not very negative– about new presidents during their administrations’ first 100 days, one of those round numbers we seem to like so much.

The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism compared the coverage of the two most recent first-term elected presidents, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. In measuring the tone of coverage by network television, newspapers and a major weekly news magazine, the study found that only 28 percent of the coverage of both presidents’ first two months was “negative.”

No president has been more successful at managing the media than Roosevelt. So carefully did the administration control the president’s image that only a few pictures were published in newspapers of the president—disabled by polio– using his wheelchair. Indeed, in a scene in the movie “Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942),” James Cagney was able with a straight face to portray Roosevelt in a song and dance number, as the “president” wittily told reporters what was on and what was off the record.

Betty Houchin Winfield, a journalism professor at the University of Missouri, argues in “FDR and the News Media” that “FDR’s consummate news management skills served as a major key to his political artistry and leadership legacy” and that “a strong president such as Roosevelt can indeed influence the journalists’ newsgathering, the reporters’ reactions, and the final news stories.”

As Douglas McCollam notes in the current issue of the Columbia Journalism Review, many believe much of the media are already in the tank for Obama.

A Pew Research Center poll during the heat of the campaign in September 2008 found that 36 percent of those questioned believed news organisations were biased in favor of Obama, while only 14 percent said the media were biased in favor of Republican John McCain. Forty percent detected no bias. A Rasmussen poll last summer was even more stark, with 49 percent saying they believed most reporters would “try to help the Democrat with their coverage.” Just 14 percent believed reporters would try to help McCain win and only 24 percent believed that “most reporters will try to offer unbiased coverage.”

Those are depressing numbers for a journalist to read—and the only way to respond is to aggressively cover the issues that matter to your audience.

For Reuters News, that’s a global audience and a financial audience.

Goller says that in response to the change in administrations, “We have made some big changes, especially in the way we work together to cover the big economic stories in the face of the financial crisis as well as the politics of climate change and health care….We’ve put more people on both the White House and the Congressional beats in part because the president…has promised change and both he and the Democratic-led Congress have made a priority of addressing the crisis, no small matter for our core financial clients.”

So how do we balance the need to be close to the newsmakers at the White House with the danger of being in a bubble where news can be managed?

Goller puts it well: “For Reuters, the key is to keep our eye on the issues, and that means to be aware of the impact a president’s words and actions or non-actions have on business, the economy, other countries and Americans as a people. We ask the tough questions in the briefings—and in the stories we write. If we don’t get the answers, our stories say so. This is our job.”

As in coverage of the Middle East, there are partisans who will never, ever be convinced that journalists can report objectively. As in the coverage of the recent Gaza fighting, all we can ask our audience to do is judge us on the journalism we produce—and tell us when we’re wrong.

It’s especially important now, as coverage of the new administration moves out of the warm, feel-good glow of the inauguration. As we saw Wednesday, the stimulus bill passed the House without a single Republican vote, a reminder of the deep divisions that remain and a sign that the story of the Obama administration is just beginning. It will be up to the hard-nosed, experienced journalists in Washington to push beyond the soft, easy, feel-good stories and tell the hard and complete truth.

Dean Wright is Global Editor, Ethics, Innovation and News Standards. Any opinions are his own.

Let’s say it up front: Almost all of you will find something in this column to take issue with.

That’s because the subject is the conflict in Gaza and perceptions of bias in reporting on it. News consumers detect media bias on any number of subjects, but there is nothing like the continuing Mideast conflict to bring out the passions of partisans on all sides.

Here’s a small sample of some of the more restrained comments that have come in to the Reuters reader feedback line:

–“It seems like the whole world wants to condemn Israel for the war/actions it’s taking. Sorry Reuters but for me, I can see right through your pro Palestinian slant. Why don’t you investigate how a U.N. Camp was used as a staging area for Hamas rockets? …”

–“Your pro Israel reporting from Gaza makes one thing perfectly clear. Israel has some control over Reuters. You are in their pocket. Why else would you choose to slant information?”

­­–“Why does Reuters insist on letting someone such as Nidal al-Mughrabi cover the war on Gaza? His reporting is completely biased and filled with inflammatory rhetoric. Doesn’t Reuters have a reporter that understands both sides of the issue and that can JUST REPORT THE NEWS!! I consider such reporting on your part as an insult to my intelligence. Why must you participate in antisemitic propaganda?”

–“Your pro-Israel news coverage of Gaza is shockingly evil. Shame on you! I’ll get the real news elsewhere.”

All feedback is taken very seriously by the editorial leadership.

“A story as important to so many people globally always is scrutinised and criticised,” says Reuters Editor-in-Chief David Schlesinger. “I take all the comments seriously, because getting it right and giving a true picture of the situation is fundamental to our mission and to the kind of news service I want to run.”

Reuters is not alone in catching flak on coverage. And we’re not alone in examining that coverage. The BBC and The New York Times have both looked at their coverage, concluding that, generally, it has been fair. But both organizations noted the difficulties of covering the conflict in Gaza, as does Reuters Jerusalem bureau chief Alastair Macdonald.

For the past two years, he says, it has been virtually impossible for Reuters staff in Gaza to leave the territory for training, rest or recuperation, as they are routinely denied exit permits by the Israeli army. The army has also prevented Reuters from sending Arabic-speaking staff based in Jerusalem or the West Bank to Gaza and more recently has banned foreign journalists from Gaza entirely. This means Reuters has been unable to send reinforcements or replacements to the Gaza bureau since the Israeli offensive began on Dec. 27. On Thursday, Reuters and other media were forced to evacuate their offices after an apparent Israeli rocket strike on the Gaza building that houses the bureau.

“Unlike many media organizations who complain that ‘there are no journalists in Gaza,’” says Macdonald, “we are very fortunate to have a team of up to 20 people working for us, led by professional journalists of long standing. Their resources, however, are greatly stretched and, aside from persistent fears for the safety of our colleagues and their families, we work in permanent anxiety that overworked equipment will fail and we will be unable to replace it.”

Within Gaza, says Macdonald, senior Hamas officials have generally accepted Reuters’ right to report independently.

“Hamas officials have largely disappeared from view since the offensive began, so they have not been in a position to restrict our reporting, even if they wanted to,” he says. Since Hamas took over, Reuters journalists “have occasionally faced problems with low-level Hamas police and other representatives who try to prevent us filming certain types of event. Such people are particularly reluctant that we should cover events that they see as evidence of challenges to their authority.”

However, Macdonald says: “We have had frank and open meetings with senior Hamas leaders when we have had concerns and are generally satisfied … We generally feel that (they) respect our independence and give us the freedom to do our jobs. We have reported incidents of official repression, including torture … and quoted people making serious allegations against the authorities.”

The Reuters team on the ground in the region is a mixture of Israelis, Palestinians and other nationalities. Reuters Politics & General News Editor Sean Maguire says most have worked for Reuters for many years. “All of them are well-versed in the need to be scrupulous in our use of language, attentive to our rules on rigorous sourcing and aware of our requirement to produce a balanced news file,” he says.

But in a story with so many different datelines, it’s up to the editing desk to pull the threads together, see though the “fog of war” and ensure that the coverage has balance and appropriate context. This team in London has decades of experience and includes several editors who have worked in the Middle East on assignment or have reinforced the Jerusalem bureau. Maguire and I agree that the editors are acutely aware of both the realities on the ground and the complex history of the region.

Several readers have written to say they see bias in Reuters coverage because they have seen stories, like this one, that don’t tell them directly why Israel launched its offensive on Dec. 27, after Hamas militants ended a six-month truce and started firing more rockets into southern Israel. A search of our stories on the Gaza conflict shows that, while there have been stories that have lacked that context, most have included it or similar explanations of the roots of the conflict.

“We are a real-time news service so we are continually tweaking and improving the news file, hour by hour,” Maguire says. “Some stories with new developments have to be moved very quickly to ensure our customers have the latest information. To do so they need to be short, so they will not contain all the background. However, such stories are quickly updated and lengthened to include the appropriate context.”

Other readers have suggested that stories focusing on the conditions in Gaza reflect a bias against Israel and call for more coverage of the hardships Israelis are suffering in the face of continuing rocket attacks. The focus of the coverage has certainly been within Gaza, because that’s where the story—and the bulk of casualties and destruction—has been.

Still, Reuters has made strong efforts to document the situation in Israel. Macdonald wrote movinglyabout how the shadows of history hang over Yad Mordechai, a kibbutz within sight of the smoke of the Gaza conflict. And Douglas Hamilton reportedon the strong resolve of residents of Sderot, a southern Israeli town that has borne the brunt of Hamas rocket attacks. The townspeople’s advice to the Israeli forces in Gaza: Keep it up. This coverage, in turn, has drawn criticism that it too readily accepts an Israeli view of the history of the region.

Even user-generated content is not immune to charges of bias. Reuters Your View, which solicits photographs from Reuters.com users, was accused of imbalance in publishing pictures of anti-Israel demonstrations, but none from the other side. In the Jan. 2 showcase of Your View pictures there were 10 images of anti-Israel protests from six locations and seven different photographers. No pro-Israel or anti-Hamas pictures were received that week. On Jan. 9, there were images of seven anti-Israel protests from four locations and six photographers. There was one image of a rocket attack on Israel, selected from three pictures that were sent. Again, no pro-Israel demonstration images were received that week, reports Leah Eichler, editor of the online newsroom.

Other readers have suggested that journalist Nidal al-Mughrabi’s first-person accounts from within Gaza, such as this onein which he describes the horrified reactions of his children during an Israeli raid, disqualify him from reporting on the conflict. Some readers have suggested that it’s impossible for a journalist to set aside his feelings and report objectively. However, I think a close reading of the article shows that while al-Mughrabi’s first reaction was to make sure his family was safe, he quickly set about the journalist’s work of filing a complete, accurate report of what was going on. “That is what you would expect from a seasoned and responsible reporter of Nidal’s high caliber,” says Maguire.

“I think first-person accounts bring to life the drama and the horror of this conflict,” says Maguire. “Journalists are human beings as well, and it is honest of our reporter Nidal to acknowledge his concern as a parent and the fear of his children when they found themselves under bombardment.”

Indeed, all journalists are called on almost daily to set aside their personal feelings or politics as we objectively cover wars, elections and other stories. Some partisans will never believe it’s possible for journalists to do that. Thankfully, I see it happen every day.

Editor-in-Chief Schlesinger puts it this way:

“Reuters News has journalists from 80 different nationalities working around the world, sometimes in their homes and often in other places. There are certainly times when events affect them and their families personally. But our professional ethics and our company’s Trust Principles mean they try their utmost to put their personal feelings aside in the interest of telling the story truthfully and without bias. As an organisation we have our standards and editing procedures in place to safeguard our report. As editor-in-chief, I take my responsibility for maintaining our standards extremely seriously, and will not tolerate willful breaches. ”

So—has Reuters News given people reason to believe we might be biased against Israel? Perhaps, if they believe a journalist can never separate his reporting of what he sees from what he may feel. And, yes, there have been stories—not many, but some—that have lacked context and have seemed imbalanced. We need to be more vigilant in making sure that all our stories carry appropriate context, as we can’t assume that every reader has read every one of our stories and thus can see our overall lack of bias.

And what seems to be pro-Palestinian or pro-Israeli reporting to readers on one continent may not raise any eyebrows on another. It’s also fair to say that articles from different news organizations have differences in tone. That’s good. Who would want one big, bland news source for the world? Reuters News is produced for a global audience and there are bound to be different reactions in the United States, Europe and other regions.

But has there been systematic bias against either side? No. I believe Reuters journalists–-the text, photo and video journalists on the ground and the editors who pull it all together– have, by and large, produced journalism that is fair and as complete as possible under the most difficult circumstances. Can we do better? Surely. Will we satisfy the partisans on both sides? Probably not.

Dean Wright is Global Editor, Ethics, Innovation and News Standards. Any opinions are his own.

A little girl in my family got a typewriter for Christmas.

Not a laptop. Nothing with a screen. A typewriter. The old-fashioned manual kind with a smeary ribbon and keys that stick.

Typewriters had pretty much gone the way of dodo birds, car tail fins and cigar-chomping editors who yell “Stop the Presses” quite some years before my granddaughter was born. But it was the typewriter used by the school-age, aspiring journalist in the movie “Kit Kittredge: An American Girl" that captivated her.

Or maybe it was the way the typewriter was used. In the movie, a tween-ish girl, played winningly by Abigail Breslin ("Little Miss Sunshine"), does old-fashioned journalism and writes stories that help right a wrong in Depression-era Cincinnati. Kit may be young, but in a challenging environment she keeps her wits—and a strong sense of ethics—about her.

In today’s rapidly realigning media landscape, typewriters have long since given way to laptops, BlackBerries, camera phones, video phones and Twitter. But here at Thomson Reuters, and in the media as a whole, the need for a strong sense of ethics has never been more necessary.

Not all Hollywood depictions of our profession are that inspiring to would-be journalists — mainly because of the way some on-screen reporters behave.

Take "Ace in the Hole," Billy Wilder’s 1951 tale of a reporter (Kirk Douglas) who cynically prolongs and manipulates coverage of a man trapped in a cave in the hope of returning to the big time. Douglas’s Chuck Tatum is as cynical as Kit is idealistic.

“I can handle big news and little news,” he tells an editor. “And if there's no news, I'll go out and bite a dog.” Later, referring to a sign in the newsroom that reads “Tell the Truth,” Tatum acknowledges some guilt. But, “Not enough to stop me. I'm on my way back to the top, and if it takes a deal with a crooked sheriff, that's alright with me! And if I have to fancy it up with an Indian curse and a broken hearted wife for Leo, then that's alright too!”

In both movies, the journalists use typewriters. It’s what they do with them that makes the difference. And today, it’s what we do with our hardware—the journalism we produce—that makes the difference.

At Thomson Reuters, there are five Trust Principles that form the bedrock on which our journalism rests. The principles, adopted by Reuters in 1941 and fully embraced by Thomson when it acquired Reuters in 2008, state that:

• Thomson Reuters shall at no time pass into the hands of any one interest, group or faction;

• Integrity, independence and freedom from bias shall at all times be fully preserved;

• Thomson Reuters shall supply unbiased and reliable news services to newspapers, news agencies, broadcasters and other media subscribers and to businesses, governments, institutions, individuals and others with whom Thomson Reuters has or may have contracts;

• Thomson Reuters shall pay due regard to the many interests which it serves in addition to those of the media; and

• No effort shall be spared to expand, develop and adapt the news and other services and products of Thomson Reuters so as to maintain its leading position in the international news and information business.

To me, at the heart of these principles are the preservation of integrity, independence and freedom from bias and the requirement that we expand, develop and adapt to maintain a leading position in news and information.

It means ethics and standards are compatible with innovation. In fact, they have to go hand in hand.

It means independent and unbiased news reporting. It also means embracing blogging, multimedia storytelling, providing knowledgeable and insightful columnists like James Saft and Bernd Debusmann; engaging with our community of users and taking advantage of the offerings of citizen journalists in You Witness. It means being ready to use technology and storytelling forms we haven’t thought of yet.

There’s a lot of room for innovation here, but there’s no room for a Chuck Tatum, who would do anything to get to the top.

In about 2020, my granddaughter will probably be using technology that hasn’t been developed yet to work on her school “newspaper,” and it almost certainly won’t be produced on paper. She won’t be using her typewriter but she will, I hope, be using what she’s learned from the journalists of this generation. It’s up to us to set the right example.

Dean Wright is Global Editor, Ethics, Innovation and News Standards. Any opinions are his own.

Some years ago, an American reporter who covered religion was at Tel Aviv airport leaving Israel.

As she was subjected to the usual questions from Israeli security, she was asked what she did for a living. “I write about religion,” she replied. “Which one?” the security officer responded. “Well, all of them,” the reporter said.

“How is that possible?” the officer asked. After 20 more minutes of questions, the reporter was allowed to board her plane, but it was clear from the conversation that the security officer could not conceive of a journalist writing about a faith to which she did not subscribe.

It’s an interesting question during this season of religious celebrations: Does a journalist have to be “religious” to cover religion? Is it desirable to have a reporter of one faith covering stories about another? What about atheist or agnostic reporters?

Reuters News Religion Editor Tom Heneghan, who produces the excellent FaithWorld blog, says reporters “need to know enough about the religion they’re covering to get beyond the usual clichés about the faith.” But, importantly, “they have to be ready to put aside the usual ‘either/or’ approach they learned covering politics or business. Religion often doesn’t fit into those categories, but into a ‘both/and’ perspective.”

For example, “Pope John Paul II was both liberal in some political issues such as defense of the poor or opposition to the Iraq War, and conservative in Catholic theology. Islam has radicals who commit violence in the name of God and moderates who say Islam is a religion of peace.”

Among Reuters journalists who cover religion are believers, agnostics and atheists, Heneghan says. His view, which I share, is that in principle all our journalists should be able to cover any religion because they are supposed to approach them objectively and that it’s hard to detect any differences in the reports they write.

“The real dividing line,” he says, “is probably between those with a religious background and those without one. Reporters who cover their own faith often have a big advantage over those who are not familiar with that faith — although they may also get too close to the story. Reporters who are believers or are from a religious background sometimes have a better feel for the complexities of a religion story, no matter which faith they are covering.”

No matter who does the reporting, Heneghan says, a good religion story is one that is clear and simple, without being simplistic.

FROM RELIGION TO FINANCE

This season of religious celebrations has also become a season of financial turmoil, alleged $50 billion Wall Street Ponzi schemes and wrenching business and government policy decisions that are putting many out of work. Against such a backdrop, it’s fair to ask how reporting on religion and ethics issues is relevant and how such reporting can help a professional audience make decisions.

The Bernard Madoff case has brought the intersection of ethics and finance into the spotlight, but even before that news broke Pope Benedict weighed in on the world economic crisis and the ethics of the financial community, branding the global financial system as “self-centered, short-sighted and lacking in concern for the poor.”

"Objectively, the most important function of finance is to sustain the possibility of long-term investment and hence of development," he wrote in the message for the Catholic Church's World Day of Peace, celebrated on Jan. 1. "Today this appears extremely fragile: it is experiencing the negative repercussions of a system of financial dealings — both national and global — based upon very short-term thinking, which aims at increasing the value of financial operations and concentrates on the technical management of various forms of risk," he said.

"The recent crisis demonstrates how financial activity can at times be completely turned in on itself, lacking any long-term consideration of the common good," he said.

Stories like that one plainly illustrate the connections between “religion news” and “financial news.”

INTERPLAY NOT DOCTRINE

At Reuters News, “Our role is to cover the interplay of religious issues with society, politics and global affairs and to ensure that we are both expert and accurate in everything we write,” says Sean Maguire, our global editor for politics and general news.

“Sometimes,” he says, “that is about understanding how the differences between Sunni and Shi’ite Islam impact the Middle East. Other times it is about how different religious beliefs impact national approaches to the difficult ethical choices in health care provision.”

What you’re not going to see are reports on arcane doctrinal differences. What you will see is coverage of the religious issues that form a backdrop to our time, such as Benedict’s criticism of the global financial system.

Such issues “are at the core of disputes and conflicts that pit ethnic and sectarian groups against each other and tip countries into war,” says Maguire. “They inform the decisions that governments take, are a big influence on electoral behavior and they form the cultural matrix within which individuals make their daily decisions.

"So we don’t cover religion in isolation, but to better understand the actions, reactions and behaviors of groups, individuals and states. That aids us in our editorial goal of helping customers make informed professional decisions.”

Unfortunately, the financial problems of the media industry have been rough on religion and ethics reporting. In the 1980s, a number of U.S. news outlets, including such papers as the San Jose Mercury News and The Dallas Morning News, made big investments in religion and ethics reporting. Now, as the industry has contracted, so has the religion beat, as Boston Globe religion reporter Michael Paulson blogged from a Religion Newswriters Association conference this past fall.

This is bad timing. We live in a world in which investors and consumers are increasingly confused about whom they can trust. There’s never been a more important time for reporting on the intersection of religion, ethics, finance and policy.

What do you think? Are the media covering religion and ethics issues in a smart way? Are we making the connections between religion and ethics issues and politics, finance and other areas? What are the stories that need to be covered in 2009?

I recently visited one of the most frightening sites on the Web—the place where I look at my shrinking retirement account.

As I calculated the investment loss since the steep decline in the markets began, and particularly since the collapse of Lehman Brothers in mid-September, some questions arose (in addition to: Will I ever be able to retire?).

--Did we in the media do our job in reporting on the run-up to the crisis?

--Now that an “official” recession has been declared in the U.S. and the depth of the crisis is becoming clearer around the world, are we in the media keeping things in perspective? Should we even be using words like “crisis” or “meltdown?”

On the first question, I can’t help thinking of Claude Rains’ “Casablanca” character Captain Renault, who was “shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on” in Rick’s club. In hindsight, given the current state of the financial markets, wasn’t it obvious a problem was brewing?

Not necessarily. And it probably wouldn’t have been obvious to anyone reading online or print coverage or watching television news in the United States.

A look at a study by the Pew Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism indicates that, in the United States, coverage of the economy was pretty much drowned out by coverage of the presidential election—at least until the two stories converged in mid-September. Indeed, as the Pew material shows, in the month preceding the week of Sept. 15, which saw the Lehman bankruptcy, the Merrill Lynch sale, the AIG bailout and large drops in share prices, the proportion of the news hole devoted to the economy reached a low for the year, filling only 4.8 percent of the time on television and radio and space in the print and online media. Since then, that focus has shifted, as the presidential campaign narrative became, again, “it’s the economy, stupid,” and as the presidential transition has focused on U.S. economic problems.

Reuters News Editor-in-Chief David Schlesinger is skeptical that financial journalists could have done much more to predict the depth of the crisis.

“Journalists do best when reporting what's happening and giving the news context and analysis,” he said. “We also do well when we look backwards and discuss past events from the perspective of the present. We do least well when we prognosticate. While our reporting and commentary did discuss potential weak points in the economy, we did not -- and nor frankly could we -- accurately predict the calamitous events of this year.”

Schlesinger worries, though, that there was a certain inevitability to the crisis and that the media played a role.

“I do worry about the narrative lines of reporting that contributed to the crisis,” he said. “To take just one example, much of the crisis was caused by banks taking on excess risks in the pursuit of higher profits. Yet had a major bank president stepped back from that fray and declined to participate, the ‘grammar’ of our results reporting would surely have compared that bank's results negatively against expectations and against its peers.

“That brave bank president would surely have lost at least his bonus and probably his job. The very fear of that kind of negative comparison helped spur things on -- as Citibank's ex-CEO Charles Prince said (while still in his job), ‘As long as the music is playing, you’ve got to get up and dance.’

“We in the media help play that music, probably exacerbating the highs on the way up and the lows on the way down.”

So did our reporting help change the tune that was being played? Did it raise questions about the factors that contributed to the crisis, including complex financial instruments, subprime mortgage lending and excessive risk?

To fully answer that would require a deeper analysis than we have room for in this space, but there is evidence that questioning notes were sounded.

As early as Aug. 18, 2003, a Reuters story quoted Fed governor Edward Gramlich citing the dangers of “predatory lending” in extending subprime credit. By 2006, the pace had accelerated. A Factiva search of Reuters News found 128 stories that mentioned the phrase “subprime mortgage” that year, including a number in which analysts predicted a deterioration in credit quality. The crescendo came in 2007, when there were more than 10,000 stories that referenced subprime mortgages and when Reuters.com built a special section to house material on the issue. That section developed into the current Crisis in Credit and Housing Market sections.

Still, the overall “music” was loud and infectious and it’s easy to understand why so many couldn’t stay off the dance floor.

Now that the crisis is here, some are accusing the media of deepening the problems. Richard Lambert, director general of the CBI, a U.K. employers group and a former editor of the Financial Times, said “careless headlines or injudicious reporting risk becoming self-fulfilling prophecies of a very serious nature.” He urged journalists to be especially vigilant in their fact-checking and called on the press to avoid such words as “panic,” “fear” and “chaos.”

He also suggested that journalists should cut bankers, regulators and politicians a little slack, since “precious few journalists gave any hint at all of what was about to come.”

The FT’s Lex column (Note: subscription required) accused Lambert of shooting the messenger and lamented that some would “seek to clamp down on the fourth estate…, hoping regulation will recreate a golden age when the business press was a tamer, more deferential beast” that “could be hushed up in times of financial turbulence.”

But those days are gone, as Lex put it. “The digital revolution, by lowering entry barriers and intensifying competition, has put paid to all that. It will not return.”

And good riddance. As a card-carrying lover of the First Amendment and the digital revolution, I’m happy those days are gone. But with our freedom comes a sometimes frightening responsibility, especially in troubled economic waters.

As Schlesinger says, “We have a responsibility to be careful, and most of our reporting has been very careful. But we too have played some discordant notes and we need to learn from that.”

What do you think? Did we in the media do our job in reporting on the financial crisis, both before the market collapse in September and since? Are we being careful enough not to sow panic and make things worse? How can our reporting help you weather the storm?

Please post your comments here.

I’ll be using this space regularly to explore issues arising from Reuters and other media coverage of the world and to have a discussion with you. Among the topics I plan to look at: the dangers and rewards of covering religion; the use of anonymous sources; the debate over shield laws for journalists, and much more. I’ll also be providing lots of space for you to have your say.

In the meantime, I’ll be watching that retirement account.

Dean Wright, Global Editor, Ethics, Innovation and News Standards