So, while bloggers, pundits, politicians and even journalists have been pronouncing “Objective Journalism” dead for many years now, we believe it never really existed in the first place. There never was “Objective Journalism” – but there is and will be an objective process that professional journalists apply to their craft, and this is what distinguishes us from the hacks.In 1997, an organization then administered by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, the Committee of Concerned Journalists, began a national conversation among citizens and news people to identify and clarify the principles that underlie journalism. After four years of research, including 20 public forums around the country, a reading of journalism history, a national survey of journalists, and more, the group released a Statement of Shared Purpose that identified nine principles. These became the basis for The Elements of Journalism, the book by PEJ Director Tom Rosenstiel and CCJ Chairman and PEJ Senior Counselor Bill Kovach. Here are those principles, as outlined in the original Statement of Shared Purpose.

The central purpose of journalism is to provide citizens with accurate and reliable information they need to function in a free society.
This encompasses myriad roles — helping define community, creating common language and common knowledge, identifying a community’s goals, heroes and villains, and pushing people beyond complacency. This purpose also involves other requirements, such as being entertaining, serving as watchdog and offering voice to the voiceless.
Over time journalists have developed nine core principles to meet the task. They comprise what might be described as the theory of journalism:

1. Journalism’s first obligation is to the truth
Democracy depends on citizens having reliable, accurate facts put in a meaningful context. Journalism does not pursue truth in an absolute or philosophical sense, but it can–and must–pursue it in a practical sense. This “journalistic truth” is a process that begins with the professional discipline of assembling and verifying facts. Then journalists try to convey a fair and reliable account of their meaning, valid for now, subject to further investigation. Journalists should be as transparent as possible about sources and methods so audiences can make their own assessment of the information. Even in a world of expanding voices, accuracy is the foundation upon which everything else is built–context, interpretation, comment, criticism, analysis and debate. The truth, over time, emerges from this forum. As citizens encounter an ever greater flow of data, they have more need — not less — for identifiable sources dedicated to verifying that information and putting it in context.

2. Its first loyalty is to citizens
While news organizations answer to many constituencies, including advertisers and shareholders, the journalists in those organizations must maintain allegiance to citizens and the larger public interest above any other if they are to provide the news without fear or favor. This commitment to citizens first is the basis of a news organization’s credibility, the implied covenant that tells the audience the coverage is not slanted for friends or advertisers. Commitment to citizens also means journalism should present a representative picture of all constituent groups in society. Ignoring certain citizens has the effect of disenfranchising them. The theory underlying the modern news industry has been the belief that credibility builds a broad and loyal audience, and that economic success follows in turn. In that regard, the business people in a news organization also must nurture–not exploit–their allegiance to the audience ahead of other considerations.

3. Its essence is a discipline of verification
Journalists rely on a professional discipline for verifying information. When the concept of objectivity originally evolved, it did not imply that journalists are free of bias. It called, rather, for a consistent method of testing information–a transparent approach to evidence–precisely so that personal and cultural biases would not undermine the accuracy of their work. The method is objective, not the journalist. Seeking out multiple witnesses, disclosing as much as possible about sources, or asking various sides for comment, all signal such standards. This discipline of verification is what separates journalism from other modes of communication, such as propaganda, fiction or entertainment. But the need for professional method is not always fully recognized or refined. While journalism has developed various techniques for determining facts, for instance, it has done less to develop a system for testing the reliability of journalistic interpretation.

4. Its practitioners must maintain an independence from those they cover
Independence is an underlying requirement of journalism, a cornerstone of its reliability. Independence of spirit and mind, rather than neutrality, is the principle journalists must keep in focus. While editorialists and commentators are not neutral, the source of their credibility is still their accuracy, intellectual fairness and ability to inform–not their devotion to a certain group or outcome. In our independence, however, we must avoid any tendency to stray into arrogance, elitism, isolation or nihilism.

5. It must serve as an independent monitor of power
Journalism has an unusual capacity to serve as watchdog over those whose power and position most affect citizens. The Founders recognized this to be a rampart against despotism when they ensured an independent press; courts have affirmed it; citizens rely on it. As journalists, we have an obligation to protect this watchdog freedom by not demeaning it in frivolous use or exploiting it for commercial gain.

6. It must provide a forum for public criticism and compromise
The news media are the common carriers of public discussion, and this responsibility forms a basis for our special privileges. This discussion serves society best when it is informed by facts rather than prejudice and supposition. It also should strive to fairly represent the varied viewpoints and interests in society, and to place them in context rather than highlight only the conflicting fringes of debate. Accuracy and truthfulness require that as framers of the public discussion we not neglect the points of common ground where problem solving occurs.

7. It must strive to make the significant interesting and relevant
Journalism is storytelling with a purpose. It should do more than gather an audience or catalogue the important. For its own survival, it must balance what readers know they want with what they cannot anticipate but need. In short, it must strive to make the significant interesting and relevant. The effectiveness of a piece of journalism is measured both by how much a work engages its audience and enlightens it. This means journalists must continually ask what information has most value to citizens and in what form. While journalism should reach beyond such topics as government and public safety, a journalism overwhelmed by trivia and false significance ultimately engenders a trivial society.

8. It must keep the news comprehensive and proportional
Keeping news in proportion and not leaving important things out are also cornerstones of truthfulness. Journalism is a form of cartography: it creates a map for citizens to navigate society. Inflating events for sensation, neglecting others, stereotyping or being disproportionately negative all make a less reliable map. The map also should include news of all our communities, not just those with attractive demographics. This is best achieved by newsrooms with a diversity of backgrounds and perspectives. The map is only an analogy; proportion and comprehensiveness are subjective, yet their elusiveness does not lessen their significance.

9. Its practitioners must be allowed to exercise their personal conscience
Every journalist must have a personal sense of ethics and responsibility — a moral compass. Each of us must be willing, if fairness and accuracy require, to voice differences with our colleagues, whether in the newsroom or the executive suite. News organizations do well to nurture this independence by encouraging individuals to speak their minds. This stimulates the intellectual diversity necessary to understand and accurately cover an increasingly diverse society. It is this diversity of minds and voices, not just numbers, that matters.

“The Reporter and the Record Egg”
My former editor was once a young reporter at a small paper in Maine. One day, a man, a farmer, called the city desk with a story idea. He said his chicken had hatched what he believed was probably a record egg. The editor dispatched Tom, who was also taking his own pictures. Tom reluctantly went, thinking that this had to be a career low – writing about an egg. He got out there, looked at the egg and listened to the farmer go on and on with pride. To Tom, it looked like, well, just a big egg, so he took his picture and went back to the newsroom, loudly laughing and complaining to his colleagues.

A few weeks later, he got a job at another daily. At his going-away party, someone gave him a copy of a picture of the egg in a frame as a joke gift. Tom went on to bigger things. But several years later, he was going through some old boxes and found that picture and he started crying. For the first time, he looked at the hands holding the egg.

They were the farmer’s hands- old, incredibly worn, covered with calluses and dirt in every crevice. He thought, here was this crusty man who worked so hard with his farm and who was so proud that one day he picked up the phone to call his local paper about an egg. And all Tom had seen was this stupid egg, not the man who was holding it. He was the story. So don’t get blinded by the egg.  - Jennifer Levitz, Wall Street Journal

People say that America doesn’t make anything any more, but we make a newspaper from scratch every day. My grandfather did that, and my father does that, and now that’s what I do. This is one of the immutable things that I have learned — or absorbed, rather — from my father.

From my earliest years I can remember the sound of the press starting up: It makes this big rumbling whine that you feel throughout the building, and you could walk back into the pressroom and watch this giant clanking, screaming mothership come alive, eating rolls of paper and spitting out a day’s worth of life at the other end. It is a massive machine, nearly two stories tall and almost the length of a basketball court.

 The press operators would be standing at the controls like ships’ captains, or reaching into the guts to make an adjustment, or pulling a finished paper off the conveyor to inspect it for quality. A press operator knows what each sound means — a certain whine portends a break in the “web,” or the line of newsprint; a hissing may tell of too much water coming into the ink pan. A clanking might warn that the whole thing is about to shut down because of malfunction; that often meant cursing and screaming at the giant machine, or tapping tenderly on a point known only to them, or reaching in to adjust something and withdrawing a hand drenched in ink.

 Since the flood, the press has been shut down, and although the mud has been cleaned away and the pressmen have been oiling it and taking care of it as much as they can, we don’t know if it will ever again rumble to life. We took a $4 million loss in the flood, and it will take six months to figure out if we can afford to repair this giant machine that has been at the heart of what we do for generations.

 My dad threw away his desk the week after the flood, the same one he’d worked at for more than 40 years. His office is cleaned out and empty, the same office where I’ve been going to visit him since I was a boy, the same place where we’ve sat to talk about important stuff like the gubernatorial campaign, the future of journalism and the birth of my son. The first time I went in after the flood, the newsroom was emptied of people, mud coated the floor and everything up to 3 feet high, and the building felt frail and abandoned.

 The destruction of these things, these places that are so familiar, is an echo of the transformation that the newspaper industry has been undergoing. The same day that the first invoice from the cleaning companies came in, we got a bill for the lawyers who argued our recent public records cases before the Vermont Supreme Court. Both bills are equally important — one represents our belief that we can and will pick up the pieces and carry on; the other represents our duty to the public trust that was passed from my grandfather to my father and from him to me.

 The irony of all this is that this is supposed to be the future of newspapers — a future without a press, a future where the office is virtual and reporters and editors don’t actually need to be in the same room. It’s a future where news and information are beamed invisibly through copper wire or fiber optic cable or through the air to tiny mobile devices that have more computing power than the entire Apollo spaceship and Houston combined. The Monday after the flood I interviewed some people and recorded it on my iPhone, then uploaded the interview to our YouTube channel, where the video evidence of the flood and the shock of loss were instantly available for anyone to watch — shock and loss that I felt myself that day. There is a certain magic in that, but the magic of print is different.

 In all this hurly-burly of change, of new technology, of cloud computing and Google Nation, our readers have found comfort in the fact that the printed word has arrived on their doorstep each morning since the flood. It’s an old-fashioned network of distribution —so inefficient compared to sending electrons across the Internet — but it has worked for more than 200 years. Technology may overtake and leave behind the printing press, but the magic of creating anew each day, the magic of telling a compelling story, the magic of standing up for the public, free speech, the downtrodden — this will not change, no matter what.

 For that lesson, I am thankful to my father.

 Rob Mitchell is state editor of the Rutland Herald and Barre-Montpelier Times Argus.