The Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ), the largest such body in the United States with about 4,000 members, has not touched its Code of Ethics since 2014.
Yet journalism has changed more in the past twelve years than in the previous five decades since the code's predecessor was adopted in 1926.
Two forces driving change
Generative AI is now used at least weekly by 56% of journalists, according to a study cited by the SPJ's ethics committee, and the technology is increasingly producing content that ends up in print or online with little visible human oversight.
At the same time, roughly a fifth of Americans now get their news from independent creators and influencers who never signed up to any professional body's rules in the first place.
Those two forces, unreliable new tools and unregulated new voices, are what pushed the SPJ to convene a 16-member committee last October under chair Dan Axelrod, a former Gannett business reporter, and vice chair Chris Roberts.
A year in the making
The committee spent nearly a year on the rewrite, running surveys of 361 people connected to journalism and 367 members of the public, holding public panel discussions during Ethics Week in April, and finishing with a contentious weekend drafting session in Indianapolis in June.
The resulting draft is deliberately silent on the word "AI" itself, a choice the committee says avoids dating the document the way earlier codes were dated by references to social media.
Instead, the draft states plainly that "speed, technology or medium do not excuse inaccuracy or unfairness" and that journalists remain responsible for their work regardless of what tools produced it.
A new tenet on misinformation
The committee has also added an entirely new tenet instructing journalists to identify misinformation and disinformation and to challenge falsehoods rather than repeat them uncritically.
That addition reflects concern within the profession about the spread of unverified claims across platforms where traditional editorial gatekeeping does not apply.
The four founding principles of the code, seeking truth, minimising harm, acting independently and being accountable, remain unchanged, but the committee has built new language intended to apply them regardless of a journalist's platform or employment status.
Who the rules now cover
That matters because the draft explicitly considers independent creators and freelancers alongside staff reporters, a recognition that the old model of a newsroom employee following an editor's rules no longer covers most of who Americans now read.
The committee will keep gathering feedback from SPJ members and the public through the final quarter of 2026 before any changes are formally adopted, continuing what Axelrod's committee describes as the code's usual deliberately slow process.
