About Code Words
Code Words is the blog of the Society of Professional Journalists' national ethics committee:
Andy Schotz, chair
Andy Schotz is a reporter for The Herald-Mail, a daily newspaper in
Hagerstown, Md. He has covered a variety of beats, including city hall
and police and courts. He occasionally fills in as city editor. His
newest assignment is covering the Maryland statehouse, starting with
the 2007 session. When he joined the paper in 2000, he was the one
person in the one-person Berkeley County, W.Va., bureau.
Schotz is on the board of SPJ’s Washington, D.C., Pro chapter and has
helped the Maryland-Delaware-D.C. Press Association with some projects.
A Long Island native, he has a bachelor’s degree from the University at
Albany in upstate New York. He previously worked for eight years at The
Altamont Enterprise, a weekly paper outside Albany, as a reporter and,
for part of that time, an editor.
Please contact Andy only at his home e-mail address, which is where he responds to SPJ inquiries.
Fred Brown, vice chair
Fred Brown is a former national president of SPJ (1997-98) and is very
active on its ethics committee. He writes a column on ethics for Quill
magazine and served on the committee that wrote the Society’s 1996 code
of ethics.
Brown officially retired from The Denver Post in early 2002, but
continues to write a Sunday editorial page column for the newspaper. He
also does analysis for Denver’s NBC television station, teaches
communication ethics at the University of Denver, and is a principal in
Hartman & Brown, LLP, a media training and consulting firm. He has
won several awards for writing and community service, including a Sigma
Delta Chi Award for editorial writing in 1988. He is an Honor Alumnus
of Colorado State University, a member of the Denver Press Club Hall of
Fame, and serves on the boards of directors of Colorado Public Radio,
the Colorado Freedom of Information Council and the Sigma Delta Chi
Foundation.
Robert Buckman
Robert
Buckman, Ph.D., is an associate professor of communication at the
University of Louisiana at Lafayette, where he has been on the faculty
since 1989. He is head of the print journalism sequence and is faculty
adviser for the SPJ chapter. His specialties include ethics,
media-military relations and Latin American media, especially press
freedom issues, and he has been a regular contributor to Quill on these
topics. He is also a freelance journalist, writing for various
newspapers and magazines on Latin American politics and on Louisiana
politics and culture. He has been on the SPJ Ethics Committee since
1996, when he participated in revising the Code of Ethics.
Buckman
earned a B.A. in journalism and political science from Texas Christian
University in 1970, his M.A. in political science from TCU in 1972 and
his Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin in 1986. He was a
reporter for the Fort Worth Press from 1972 to ’74, an editor with the
U.S. Foreign Broadcast Information Service from 1974 to ’80 and the
Texas capitol correspondent for the Fort Worth News-Tribune from 1980
to ’86. He was on the faculty of Loyola University in New Orleans from
1986 to ’89. He served a Fulbright Fellowship in Chile in 1991.He was
president of the Southeast Journalism Conference in 1998 and ’99.
Casey Bukro
Casey Bukro is an overnight editor for the Chicago Tribune, where he has worked since 1961.
Before
becoming an editor in 2000, he was an environment writer since 1967 and
was the first reporter to hold that title on a major American
newspaper. He pioneered environment and natural resource reporting in
America.
Bukro previously served as SPJ's national ethics chair
and regional director for SPJ's region 5. He participated in writing
SPJ's Code of Ethics and was awarded the Wells Key in 1983. He
co-founded the Ethics AdviceLine for Journalists and is the Chicago
Headline Club's ethics chair.
Bukro was born and grew up in
Chicago and holds bachelor's and master's degrees from the Medill
School of Journalism at Northwestern University.
Felisa Cardona
Felisa
Cardona is a police reporter for the Denver Post in Colorado. She began
her journalism career in Southern California where she covered prisons,
courts and crime for several years at the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin,
the San Bernardino Sun and the now-defunct, Inland Valley Our Times
edition of the Los Angeles Times. In the last few months, Cardona, 34,
has covered the arrest of John Mark Karr in the JonBenet Ramsey case,
the school shooting in Bailey, Colo. and the allegations made by a gay
escort that he had a sexual relationship with Colorado Springs Pastor
Ted Haggard, the founder of an evangelical mega-church.
Al Cross
Al
Cross is director of the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community
Issues, based at the University of Kentucky. He was a reporter at The
Courier-Journal for 26 years, 15 as the Louisville newspaper’s chief
political writer. He was national president of the Society of
Professional Journalists in 2001-02. His awards include a share of the
Pulitzer Prize for general news reporting won by The C-J’s staff in
1989. He has been a frequent panelist on Kentucky Educational
Television's “Comment on Kentucky” and lives in Frankfort. He is a
native of Albany, Ky., and a graduate of Western Kentucky University.
He is a member of the Society because SPJ improves and protects
journalism and the public interest by standing up for First Amendment
rights and promoting ethical practices. “These functions are more
important now than ever before,” he said.
Hugh Davis
Hugh
Davis is a freelance reporter of law and political matters in Eastern
Washington State (Spokane area). His formal journalism career in the
Northwest included stints as a stringer for Associated Press (Portland
Bureau), city hall reporter for the Spokane Daily Chronicle, assignment
editor for KREM TV News, senior editor for a business journal, and
communications manager for the state’s second largest public school
district. He joined the University of Oregon Chapter of Sigma Delta
Chi/Society of Professional Journalists in 1970 where he received a
bachelor of science degree in journalism.
Jerry Dunklee
Jerry
Dunklee is a journalism professor at Southern Connecticut State
University. He has four decades of experience as a broadcaster and
teacher. He has worked as a news reporter, news director, program
director and talk show host on radio, TV and cable in New Haven, New
York and Boston. Dunklee has been published in the New York Times,
Hartford Courant, New Haven Register, The Communicator and Quill.
Dunklee is a member of the board of directors and a past president of
the Connecticut Pro chapter of SPJ. He conducts ethics seminars and
writing workshops for professional journalists.
Bill Gannon
Bill
Gannon is the director of online operations at Lucasfilm Ltd., where he
has strategic and operational leadership roles and responsibilities for
all online activities at Lucasfilm Ltd.
He
was formerly senior editorial director and managing editor of Yahoo!
Inc., where he had companywide editorial strategy and leadership
responsibilities in product development, content programming, front
page news, and a range of policy issues.
Gannon led Yahoo!’s
Front Page News programming for 3 1/2 years, including coverage of the
wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Southeast Asia tsunami, and Hurricane
Katrina. He and his team raised more than $60 million in relief aid
from Yahoo! users.
Gannon created a number of new products and
services at Yahoo!, including the Yahoo! Buzz Log, The Yahoo!
Netrospective, and the Yahoo! Time Capsule. He also played a leadership
role in the development of a host of other new products, product
features, and enhancements.
Prior to joining Yahoo!, Gannon
was editorial director and managing editor of Financial Engines Inc., a
high-tech financial services startup. He received a co-inventor patent
for his Internet product development work with a team of colleagues and
company founder and Nobel laureate (Economics) William Sharpe.
Prior
to joining Financial Engines, Gannon was a national correspondent for
The Star-Ledger of N.J., and Newhouse Newspapers Inc., where he covered
national politics, terrorism, investigative reporting, and conflict
beat reporting, including wars in Africa and the Middle East.
He
is a former John S. Knight Fellow at Stanford University and has
received a number of national journalism awards, including the National
Headliner Award, The CIT Investigative Award, and four NYC SPJ Deadline
Club Awards. He was the New Jersey Press Association Journalist of the
Year and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist with a team of reporters from
The Star-Ledger in 2001.
In addition to his work at Lucasfilm,
he currently teaches online journalism at the University of
California-Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. He is co-chairman
of the Knight New Media Center and a member of the center’s National
Advisory Board. He also serves on the Board of Advisors to New Voices,
a community news incubator project sponsored by J-Lab: The Institute
for Interactive Journalism at the University of Maryland’s Philip
Merrill College of Journalism.
Irwin Gratz
Irwin
Gratz has been in radio news for nearly 30 years. He worked as a
reporter, anchor and News Director for the number-one rated commercial
station in Portland, Maine before going to work for public radio in
1992 as local anchor of “Morning Edition.”
A native of New York City, Irwin holds a Masters Degree in journalism
from New York University. He has taught a college course on media
ethics and has been a guest lecturer on journalism ethics and broadcast
news writing.
Irwin has been a member of the Society of Professional Journalists
since 1983 and has held positions as a state chapter president, a
member of its national board and was the Society’s national President
in 2004 and 2005.
Irwin lives outside of Portland, Maine with his wife and young son.
Liz Hansen
Elizabeth K. Hansen is a professor in the Department of Communication
at Eastern Kentucky University where she has taught since 1987. She
teaches Community Journalism, Media Ethics, Writing and Reporting News,
Writing and Selling Nonfiction, Media Law, Public Affairs Reporting and
Feature Writing.
Hansen
holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Arkansas
at Fayetteville, a master’s degree in journalism and mass communication
from Iowa State University, and a Ph.D. in communication with emphases
in mass media law and ethics from the University of Kentucky.
Hansen
worked as a reporter for The Springdale News and the Arkansas Democrat
in Arkansas and the State-Times in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. She also is
a freelance writer whose work has been published in newspapers and
magazines in Mississippi, Kentucky and elsewhere. Before joining the
faculty at Eastern, she taught at Iowa State University, the University
of Southern Mississippi and the University of Kentucky.
Hansen,
who has been a member of SPJ for 30 years, is immediate past president
of the Bluegrass Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists and
advises the Eastern Kentucky University SPJ chapter. She serves on the
steering committee for the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community
Issues, a multi-state, multi-institution program headquartered at the
University of Kentucky. She is also a member of the Association for
Education in Journalism and Mass Communication and the Association for
Practical and Professional Ethics. She received the 2004 Russ Metz Most
Valuable Member Award from the Kentucky Press Association for her work
on a statewide public records audit.
Jane Kirtley
Jane
E. Kirtley has been the Silha Professor of Media Ethics and Law at the
School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of
Minnesota since August 1999. Prior to that, she was Executive Director
of The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press in Arlington,
Virginia, for 14 years.
She
was appointed Director of The Silha Center for the Study of Media
Ethics and Law in May 2000, and was named to the affiliated faculty of
the University of Minnesota Law School in March 2001. During the Spring
2004 semester, she was a Distinguished Visiting Professor of Law at
Suffolk University Law School in Boston, Massachusetts.
Kirtley speaks frequently on First Amendment and freedom of information
issues, both in the United States and abroad. She also writes the
“First Amendment Watch” column for American Journalism Review.
Prof.
Kirtley received her J.D. degree from Vanderbilt University School of
Law in 1979. She holds bachelor’s and master’s of journalism degrees
from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism.
Sara Stone
Dr.
Sara Stone, professor of journalism at Baylor University, teaches
courses in media law and ethics and reporting and is the director of
undergraduate studies for the journalism department at Baylor.
She
served on a nationwide Task Force on the Ethics of the Media Coverage
of the Mount Carmel standoff sponsored by the Society of Professional
Journalists. She was national vice president for campus chapter affairs
for the Society of Professional Journalists from 1988 to 1994. She is
the SPJ student chapter adviser at Baylor.
Stone has
professional journalistic experience in both print and broadcast. After
graduating from the University of New Mexico in 1970 she joined the
staff of the Amarillo Globe-News where she served as a reporter, copy
editor, night news editor and assistant night city editor over the next
four-and-a-half years. She obtained a master’s degree in mass
communications at Texas Tech University and taught in the journalism
department at West Texas State University (now West Texas A&M) from
1974 to 1980. During the summers from 1976 through 1980 she worked as a
reporter and weekend co-anchor for television station KVII, the ABC
affiliate in Amarillo.
From 1980 to 1982, Stone attended the
University of Tennessee where she earned a Ph.D. in communications.
While a doctoral student, she worked part-time as a copy editor for the
Knoxville News-Sentinel. She was named an outstanding doctoral student
in the College of Communications at Tennessee, where she was a Bickel
Fellow.
She has been on the faculty of the Baylor University
journalism department since the fall of 1982. She has attended
journalism educator workshops put on by both the American Press
Institute and by the Poynter Institute. In 1987, she also was named the
Outstanding Society of Professional Journalists Campus Chapter Adviser
in the United States.
Peter Sussman
Peter
Y. Sussman is an independent journalist and author who spent 29 years
in various editing positions at the San Francisco Chronicle. He has
received numerous national and local journalism and First Amendment
awards, many of them for his pioneering advocacy for media access to
prisoners and his defense of Dannie M. Martin, a federal prisoner who
was punished for an article he wrote that Sussman published in The
Chronicle.
He
is the co-author with Martin of Committing Journalism: The Prison
Writings of Red Hog (W.W. Norton, 1993) and the editor of Decca: The
Letters of Jessica Mitford (Knopf and Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2006).
Sussman,
a longtime member of SPJ's Ethics Committee, has also served as
California Sunshine chair and two terms as president of the Northern
California professional chapter. Among his national awards from SPJ are
the Freedom of Information Award (1990), the Howard S. Dubin
Outstanding Professional Chapter Member Award (1997) and the Wells
Memorial Key, the Society's highest honor for an individual member
(1999). In bestowing the Wells Key, the Society cited his
“instrumental” role in writing SPJ's current Code of Ethics and his
advocacy of press freedoms and journalism diversity, in both hiring and
coverage.
Beginning in 2002, Sussman wrote and lectured widely
on wartime journalism ethics, based on specific ethical conflicts
during the "war on terror" and the Afghan and Iraqi invasions. He
conducted a number of workshops to reconsider journalists’ wartime
ethical obligations. One product of those workshops was a proposed set of guidelines to help resolve ethical conflicts in wartime.
Further details on Sussman's career are available at peterysussman.com.
Adrian G. Uribarri
Adrian G. Uribarri is a staff writer at the Orlando (Fla.) Sentinel. From 2005 to 2006, he served as campus representative on the society's national board of directors. In 2007, two years after he graduated from the program, he served as a facilitator at the Ted Scripps Leadership Institute in Indianapolis.
In 2005, he was a Dow Jones Newspaper Fund business-reporting intern at the Sentinel, and a year later, he rejoined the Fund as a copy-editing intern at the San Francisco Chronicle's business desk. From 2006 to 2007, he spent six months reporting at the Los Angeles Times.
His work also has been published at The Gainesville (Fla.) Sun and The Independent Florida Alligator, and he has served as an anchor, producer and reporter at Mid-Florida Public Radio.
He holds bachelor's degrees in journalism and political science from the University of Florida, where he served as president of the society's campus chapter.
He also is a member of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists.
Nerissa Young
Nerissa Young is a recovering print journalist employed as visiting
assistant professor of mass communications at Shepherd University in
Shepherdstown, W.Va. Before that, she taught in the journalism school
at Oklahoma State University in Stillwater. Young has nearly 20 years
of media experience that includes radio, newspapers, freelance and
journalism education. A native West Virginian, she received her
bachelor’s degree in secondary education from Concord College and her
master’s degree in journalism from Marshall University. She has been a
member of SPJ’s national ethics committee since 1995 and just finished
seven years as chairwoman of SPJ’s national Project Watchdog committee.
Young writes a weekly column, “The Back Porch,” about whatever tickles
her momentary fancy for her former employer, The (Beckley, W.Va.)
Register-Herald. At Shepherd, she teaches Introduction to Mass
Communications, Writing for Mass Media, Media Law and Ethics and
Documentary Journalism.