ST. PETERSBURG, FL (June 26, 2025) — More than a year ago, the Poynter Institute published a “starter kit” for newsrooms to create their own ethics policies for using artificial intelligence in their journalism. AI use in newsrooms has grown swiftly since then — and gotten more complex — and the team behind the starter kit has just published a new update, adding more information for visual journalism and for those developing products in newsrooms.
“One of the biggest things we heard over the last year was, the editorial guidelines are great, but what do your visual teams do? What is allowed there?” said Poynter faculty member and MediaWise director Alex Mahadevan, who helps lead Poynter’s AI work. “And people building these products — chatbots and such — what are their ethical obligations?”
The new update includes a section to walk newsrooms through the considerations for using AI in visual work, and cautions: “The use of visual generative AI tools exposes newsrooms to the most risk in regards to audience trust, and should be discussed in depth at your newsroom.” The guidelines put a value on human coverage as the preferred option if possible, accuracy over aesthetics, no manipulation of real people and events and more.
The toolkit doesn’t prescribe a newsroom’s use of the technology, on visual AI or in other areas. Some newsrooms might ban AI use in any image creation. Some might allow it with certain circumstances and disclosures. The toolkit helps newsrooms create a formal ethics policy based on their comfort level with certain uses and how they’ll communicate that to their audience.
“This is to help newsrooms,” Mahadevan said. “It really starts with thinking about what your values are and building the policies around that.”
Much of the new material was devised and workshopped during Poynter’s second Summit on AI, Ethics and Journalism, which took place in New York City in April, this time in partnership with The Associated Press.
Poynter published its first guidelines in March 2024, and refined them further following its first AI Summit in St. Petersburg in June 2024. Much has changed in AI use in journalism since then, Poynter leaders said.
“Before we published these guidelines, most of the newsrooms that I talk to were avoiding AI, thinking that no good could come from it,” said Kelly McBride, Poynter senior vice president and chair of the Craig Newmark Center for Ethics and Leadership. “Many newsrooms are now doing tiny experiments, and many more are contemplating adding AI to their workflows.”
“A lot more people are using AI tools and recognizing that AI is not something we can run from. Again, there is such a demand for access to guardrails. A lot of news organizations have gone from these ad hoc experimentations to ‘how are we going to build this into our CMS?’ ” Mahadevan said. “The phrase I keep hearing is operationalizing AI — how are we building AI into our workflow in a way that is valuable to our readers?”
Another important update is about news products, again emphasizing the values of transparency, fairness, human oversight and audience trust. Specific sections talk about guarding against biases inherent in AI and avoiding creating a reinforcing viewpoint bubble.
“One of the things we talked about a lot is what are we going … to encourage newsrooms to do to avoid echo chambers if they are personalizing content?” Mahadevan said. “We put in these guidelines as a suggestion — the idea of breaking the bubble — so we have something in there about making sure when you design personalization, you do it to expose audiences to a broad range of stories and viewpoints.”
The authors acknowledged that the starter kit for newsrooms is a long document because it asks them to thoughtfully consider and prepare for lots of situations — but it’s easier than getting into trouble because you haven’t planned.
“It takes a small group of journalists a couple hours to fill in the guidelines, run it up the flagpole to news executives, and then issue a memo to the entire staff,” McBride said. “So it’s not completely plug and play, but it’s worth the time investment, because journalism ethics work best when there is local autonomy and buy-in.”
To help news organizations share their ethics policies with their audiences, Poynter also has created a short, to-the-point, public-facing document that will give news consumers the basics in a digestible format. News organizations can post it on their website, explaining the ways they use AI and how they communicate it, and link to their full ethics policy.
Poynter’s work with AI and AI ethics has also grown significantly in the last year, including expanding its AI training options and adding AI as a category of its new Consulting & Coaching offerings tailored to specific newsrooms’ needs. Mahadevan, McBride and faculty member Tony Elkins continue to teach and present on AI issues at conferences and meetings across the world, and Poynter experts are in-demand media sources on AI topics.
In May, Poynter’s MediaWise media literacy program launched the Talking About AI Newsroom Toolkit to help journalists explain how they are using AI to their audiences. That project was completed in partnership with The Associated Press and funded by Microsoft.
Media Contact
Jennifer Orsi
Vice President, Publishing and Local News Initiatives
The Poynter Institute
Jorsi@poynter.org
About The Poynter Institute
The Poynter Institute is a global nonprofit working to address society’s most pressing issues by teaching journalists and journalism, covering the media and the complexities facing the industry, convening and community building, improving the capacity and sustainability of news organizations and fostering trust and reliability of information. The Institute is a gold standard in journalistic excellence and dedicated to the preservation and advancement of press freedom in democracies worldwide. Through Poynter, journalists, newsrooms, businesses, big tech corporations and citizens convene to find solutions that promote trust and transparency in news and stoke meaningful public discourse. The world’s top journalists and emerging media leaders rely on the Institute to learn new skills, adopt best practices, better serve audiences, scale operations and improve the quality of the universally shared information ecosystem.
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