Last updated, June 10, 2012

This annotated list is a work in progress and will be regularly updated. In some cases I’m linking to an article about a project if that best clarifies the context of the initiative in question, but in these instances those articles go on to link back to the main report. The projects are listed in reverse chronological order. I say a bit more about the rationale for inclusions on this list at the bottom of this page.

What have I left out? Please email me at l.zion@latrobe.edu.au or tweet me with any suggestions.

• Best Practices for Digital Reporting (Columbia Journalism School, research project announced in April, 2012) This project will fund reseach on how new practices and tools affect audiences and newsroom resources, transparency in journalism, and data visualization.
• 10 Best Practices for Twitter for Journalists (Susana Herrera Damas and José Luis Requejo Aleman, 2012) This academic study examines the Twitter accounts of several leading news outlets.
• Copyright, free speech, and the public’s right to know: How journalists think about fair use (Center for Social Media, Washington, 2012) This report is part of a project examining how journalists are dealing with the copyright doctrine of fair use in new and emerging media platforms.
• Collective Work: Best Practices for Collaborative Investigative Reporting (The Investigative Reporting Program at U.C. Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, 2012) An exploratory and, yes, collaborative project. To quote one of the authors: ’The ultimate value of these best practices will be if we view them as a collaborative, open-source document: a starting point for more formalized and smoother collaborating’.
• Best practices in digital accuracy and correction (Canadian Association of Journalists, 2011) A report by the CAJ’s Ethics Advisory Committee that considers  new challenges raised by digital publishing.for defining best practices in corrections.
• Open Journalism (Melanie Sill, 2011) A project based on the ‘simple idea’ that ‘It’s time to open up journalism’s processes, not just its outcomes, to more robust and effective interaction with sources, contributors and consumers’.
• Best Practices for Social Media Verification: Some tips and thoughts from the experts (Craig Silverman, 2011) A CJR post that discusses several attempts to progress emerging best practices in social media verification.
• Twitter for Journalists: Engagement and Best Practices (Knight Digital Media Center, June 2011) Excellent example-rich post by Scot Hacker and Ashwin Seshagiri that unravels out of the maxim that Twitter is a social network.
• Best Practices for Bloggers: Dimensions for Consideration (Center for Digital Ethics & Policy, Loyola University, Chicago) This report is based on the premise that ‘Constructing and maintaining a blog, regardless of its genre or style, requires that consequences be considered in the following categories: transparency, attribution, responsibility, face, text, truth, and citizenship.’
• Standard: Suicide reporting (Australian Press Council, 2011) This report, which concluded that ‘general reporting and comment on issues relating to suicide can be of substantial public benefit’, has stimulated debate about responsible media coverage of what has often been a taboo issue in Australia.
• 10 Best Practices for Social Media: Helpful Guidelines for News Organizations (American Society of News Editors, 2010-11)  The guidelines in this report, which were offered ’as a framework to help editors form their own policies’, have provoked a lively discussion.
• Ethics of Unpublishing (Canadian Association of Journalists, 2010) This report explores how best to deal with requests to remove online content  and offers 10 recommended best practices.
• Scan and analysis of Best Practices in digital journalism in and outside of U.S. public broadcasting (Center for Social Media,Washington D.C. 2009) As well as outlining a series of best practices categories and this impressively researched report recommends two areas for further study: emerging business models and impact measurement for digital journalism.
• Reporting diversity project (Australian Department of Immigration and Citizenship, 2007) A partnership of universities and media organizations developed curricula/professional development resources for current and future journalists  to inform the reporting of multicultural issues and events.

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The projects listed above differ considerably in scale, ranging from blog posts to large-scale research initiatives. I’ve included them if I consider they match most of the criteria I’ve outlined in the discussion in this blog’s about page, and in this conference paper - in short, if they’re opening up the discussion of how to address issues that arise with emerging practices in digital journalism. Some of the reports listed above aren’t specifically badged “best practices”, but are serving that purpose in all but name. Conversely, I’m not automatically including every post or project that uses the term “best practices” in its title. For instance I would be unlikely to draw attention to a report entitled ‘Best Practices in Preventing Web Traffic from Bleeding to Rival Sites’ (I’ve checked and it doesn’t exist – yet).

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