Banner image for “Creating Safe and Fair Newsrooms”Banner image for “Creating Safe and Fair Newsrooms”Banner image for “Creating Safe and Fair Newsrooms”

Leadership Skills

Creating Safe and Fair Newsrooms

News organizations must create safe and fair workplaces in which everyone can do their best work. Though it might seem counterintuitive, understanding why and how unethical behavior persists and creates unfair and unsafe workplaces is a prerequisite to understanding how to create safe and fair workplaces.

What You'll Learn:

  • An understanding of how the concepts of behavioral ethics — cognitive biases, social and organizational pressures and situational factors — enable sexual harassment to continue in news organizations.
  • An understanding of the organizational factors that contribute to unethical behavior such as networks of complicity, problematic newsroom policies and practices, and toxic newsroom cultures.
  • Familiarity with sexual harassment law.
  • Practice thinking about how to respond if you were to see someone being subjected to unethical or illegal behavior in a news organization.
  • An understanding of how to create a newsroom that is a safe and fair workplace in which journalists can do their best work.