The San Jose City Council recently adopted a lobbyist ordinance, essentially an ethics policy intended to bring to light and put limits on the symbiotic relationships that develop between elected officials and special-interest groups.

The New York Times and a number of other highly regarded publications have had to admit in recent years to embarrassing episodes of plagiarism, exaggeration and, in some cases, downright fabrication. All of which brought about reviews of their existing ethics policies. The Times, which already had an extensive ethics policy, dug even deeper into its own culture for clues to how its editors could have missed the plagiarism and fabrication of one of its up-and-coming stars, Jayson Blair.

It's not as if journalists don't know that many people already consider their chosen profession less than honorable, so when we hear that publications we hold in the highest esteem have stumbled, we tend to question how we go about our business—whether we work for big metropolitan dailies or for weekly community papers.

The truth is that most journalists take their role in the community very seriously, and we want to approach our work in an ethical manner. In fact, hand-wringing is an occupational hazard for journalists. We worry about being fair; we worry about conflicts of interest; we worry about who might be hurt by a story and, likewise, what the consequences of not running a story might be.

At the Community Newspapers, we recently adopted a document called "Standards and Ethical Practices," so these are issues very close to the surface for us. I believe we have always approached the job of covering local communities in a professional and ethical manner, but when I read about the Jayson Blair incident I realized that although we certainly don't condone plagiarism or embellishment, we didn't actually have a written policy stating that. Our editors agreed that it was something we should have.

In coming up with our document, we pored over ethics policies of newspapers and professional journalism organizations from around the country, and that led to discussions among our editors about who we are and how we do our job. Hand-wringing is exhausting. But it's a very healthy thing for a newspaper community.

Our ethics policy covers the bases from the use of confidential sources to the ethics of accepting free tickets.

The amazing thing about the process of developing our ethics policy is what we've learned about ourselves along the way. To arrive at our standards and practices document, our editors have talked about putting stories in context, writing headlines that accurately reflect the story and using "loaded" words that slant the meaning of a story. We've talked at length about conflicts of interest, both real and perceived.

Probably more important than the document we have written, though, is the process we are beginning to implement that helps us weigh the many gray areas of news coverage against the core values to which we adhere.

Recently when an editor wanted to do a story I thought had questionable merit, I asked him to make his case at a meeting of our editors, so that we could evaluate the idea in terms of its news value, our obligation to the sources and the value of the story to the community. Instead of an argument between an editor and executive editor, what we experienced was a discussion of the merit of the story based on our core values as a newspaper company. A decision was made, and no one felt as if a position had been won or lost. Rather, the decision reinforced our commitment to do our job of reporting the news in an honorable and ethical manner, recognizing that putting a set of core values on a piece of paper is only the jumping-off place for making decisions that reflect these values in our news coverage.

At the Community Newspapers, we continue to wring our hands and worry about fairness and conflicts of interest, but now we have an agreed-upon code—and a process for judging how well our news judgment adheres to the values we think are important.