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Kevin Z. Smith has been a member of the SPJ ethics committee for 20 years. He is a contributing author to two of SPJ's Doing Ethics in Journalism case study books. He is the co-author of SPJ's 1993 Ethics Manual, a guide for developing better ethical discussions and practices in newsrooms. He served as chairman of the ethics committee from 1995-97 when the Code was revised by the committee. He is serving his fifth year as committee chairman. He is a former president of SPJ (09-10) and a former member of the national and executive boards (06-11). He has been a member of the Sigma Delta Chi Foundation since 2007. He has been a regular speaker, panelist and lecturer on journalism ethics and delivered talks around the United States and abroad since 1990.
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.
Lauren Bartlett is currently a Director at Large for the Society of Professional Journalists, chairs the national Communications Committee and is a member of the Ethics Committee and the Finance Committee.
Elizabeth Donald has been a reporter with the News-Democrat for over a decade. She is a mobile reporter covering Madison County, with an emphasis on city government, education and the environment. She is the News-Democrat's liaison to the Latino Roundtable of Southwestern Illinois, author of several fiction novels and writes CultureGeek, the News-Democrat's pop-culture blog.
Mike Farrell serves as director of the Scripps Howard First Amendment Center at the University of Kentucky and as an associate professor in the School of Journalism and Telecommunications. He began teaching as an adjunct in 1980 at Northern Kentucky University, continued as a graduate teaching assistant at UK in 1996, and has been a full-time faculty member there since 2000. He won the college teaching award in 2006.
Paul Fletcher has been publisher and editor-in-chief at Virginia Lawyers Weekly in Richmond, Va., since 1989. 
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.” 
Hagit Limor’s other experience with SPJ includes stints as National President; National President-Elect; National Secretary-Treasurer; National Membership Committee; National Finance Committee Chair; current National Legal Defense Fund Committee chair; National Chair of Executive Director Search Committee; Board Member of the Sigma Delta Chi Foundation; and Greater Cincinnati Pro Chapter President, membership chairman and current board member.
Jim Pumarlo spent 27 years working at small daily newspapers in International Falls and Red Wing, Minn. He served as editor of the Red Wing Republican Eagle for 21 years. He resigned in December 2003 and currently is director of communications at the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce, the state’s largest business advocacy organization. He can be contacted at www.pumarlo.com.
Andrew is a medical journalist for Reuters Health in New York. Before coming to Reuters Health, he was a Kaiser Media Fellow at Reuters’s Washington, D.C. bureau, where he covered the implementation of the Affordable Care Act.
WHAT: John Mark Karr, 41, was arrested in mid-August in Bangkok, Thailand, at the request of Colorado and U.S. officials. During questioning, he confessed to the murder of JonBenet Ramsey, who had been beaten and strangled to death in the basement of her Boulder, Colorado, home sometime during Christmas night 1996. (The murder was a media obsession for much of 1997, and video clips of the young beauty contestant competing in various costumes ran, it seems, every few hours.)
Karr was arrested after Michael Tracey, a journalism professor at the University of Colorado, alerted authorities to information he had drawn from e-mails Karr had sent him over the past four years. Karr had initiated the correspondence, apparently intrigued by Tracey’s argument, in documentaries and elsewhere, that John and Patsy Ramsey had been unfairly implicated in their daughter’s death. Karr was returned to Boulder for DNA testing and ultimately cleared. But he wasn’t freed; he also faced misdemeanor child pornography charges in California.
WHO: Put yourself in the shoes of a news director or managing editor. Could you resist this story, especially if you were in Colorado? In the first three weeks after Karr’s “confession,” the Rocky Mountain News ran 150 stories about him, including this first-day lead: “The decade-long search for JonBenet Ramsey’s killer came to a startling end in Thailand on Wednesday.” The Denver Post probably ran a similar number, but its web site list cuts off after 10 hits. In JonBenet’s home town of Boulder, the Daily Camera ran 120 stories during the same period.
Or imagine you’re Professor Tracey.
The Question: Do you break a confidence with your source if you think it can solve a murder — or protect children half a world away?
There are many stakeholders in this case, including the media, Tracey and, of course, Karr himself. Add Boulder law enforcement authorities, who had been criticized for bungling the original case 10 years previously, and now for spending $23,656, including two business-class airfares, to bring a delusional man back to face dubious charges. Ramsey family members are major stakeholders. Even the University of Colorado j-school is among many parties with a peripheral interest.
WHY: The principles involved in deciding what to do include the media’s obligations to their readers and viewers to present the news in full while maintaining a sense of responsibility and balance. For Professor Tracey, there’s a struggle between confidentiality and collaboration. And should the media be critical of authorities who, after all, pulled Karr away from the temptation of children in Thailand, where he was about to begin a teaching job?
HOW: We’ve seen how the media reacted to this story — at full throttle. Was it overkill? A bit more skepticism and proportionality would have been more professional. Was Professor Tracey’s role appropriate? He considers himself an academic, not a journalist. But even if he were a journalist, wrote Rocky Mountain News media columnist David Kopel, he should act like an ethical human being. Kopel’s argument is worth repeating.
“Some critics claim that if journalists cooperate with the police, they will lose the trust of their audience. But just imagine how much less most readers would trust the newspapers if readers learned that a reporter refused to reveal non-confidential information which could have led to the capture of a notorious murderer.”
ANALYSIS: Some principles (from the SPJ Code of Ethics), and comment:
— Journalists should be honest, fair and courageous in gathering, reporting and interpreting information. (Quantity, more than quality, is the question.)
— Test the accuracy of information from all sources and exercise care to avoid inadvertent error. (In a highly competitive rush, it’s difficult — but still necessary.)
— Show good taste. Avoid pandering to lurid curiosity. (Lurid curiosity is sometimes unavoidable.)
— Be judicious about naming criminal suspects before the formal filing of charges.
— Be vigilant and courageous about holding those with power accountable.
— Clarify and explain news coverage and invite dialogue with the public over journalistic conduct. (There was plenty of explaining where the information came from, and a flood of letters to the editor.)
— SPJ Ethics Committee
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