When reporting on current, recent or historic events, producers of journalistic crime content:

1. Must not produce content based on rumour, conjecture or falsehoods.
2. Must not engage in intimidation, harassment or persistent pursuit of victims or their families when newsgathering or through persistent publication.
3. Must adhere to media law relating to the exposure or reporting of criminality, particularly in relation to court proceedings, contempt of court and potential risks to justice.
4. Must not include references to class, race, religion, sexuality, nationality or disability unless there is a direct link to the crime itself.
5. Must not suggest or apply languages of crime to individuals or social groups when there is no specific evidence of criminality and should identify those individuals specifically involved wherever possible.
6. Must not pay officials of criminal justice or those accused or convicted of criminality. Payment for the time of victims or to former officials of criminal justice may be permitted if the piece is of discernible public interest or to support actions that raise awareness on issues of public safety.
7. Must prioritise the rights of victims and/or their loved ones to privacy or to be heard as they choose. There must be discernible public interest to revisit a historic case where victims are living and consent of victims and their next of kin must be sought wherever possible.
8. Must not identify relatives or family members of accused or convicted criminals unless there is a public interest defence in the interests of open justice or clear relevance to the crime itself.
9. Should emphasise social, economic and political reasons for criminality particularly of survival and give equal resource to the reporting or exposure of crimes of corruption
10. Must protect the interests of children either when victims or when involved in criminality and recognise their inability to consent to interview until over the age of 18. This should not restrict the reporting of legal proceedings.

.

By signing up to such a code of practice, media professionals from across traditional news organisations, documentary, podcasting and audio and a new breed of professional influencers, can be clear of their own, and identify others’, ethical hard lines.

The aim is that this could also be a way to reignite trust between local journalists and the police, who are no longer speaking as much as they once did due to the impacts of Leveson, with firmer ethical grounds. The 10-point Code for the Production of Journalistic Crime Content offers a means to establish the parameters of exchange. Just as signing up to crime reporters’ associations facilitated greater access to information and interview in the mid-20^th century, so too might agreement about the terms by which you work together. This could be a mutually beneficial, ethically clear, exchange.

When working as a full-time journalist, it was in relation to crime that I produced the work which best served public interests, open justice and victims’ voices. It was also a crime story that made me quit industry for good after just 30 or so months at national tabloids. At what now seems like the impossibly immature age of 23, I became a crime reporter at my local newspaper, where I worked during NCTJ training and sat my senior examinations.

Despite these qualifications, and newsroom experience across the previous six or so years, I was ill-equipped to deal with some of the content that fell within my remit and better equipped than many other journalists who rarely venture into areas blighted by crime such as those in which I was raised, other than to report it. When writing Journalism and Crime this was at the forefront of my mind, and the code – which will now be taken out for consultation with crime media professionals – was developed because of the research in that book which spanned from earliest origins to the present day.

The next step is the development of a research bid to fund an international network of academics to take the code out to industry in workshops designed for consultation, discussion and then adoption. Those who sign up would be given a “kitemark” as an ethical standard by which police, victims and audience members could identify ethically produced crime news and journalism.