By Megan Irwin — Arizona State University

Credibility and ethics have long been the cornerstones of good journalism, and in the age of online media the basic rules of the trade haven't changed. They've just become harder to apply.

In a panel titled "The Real World: When Bad Things Happen to Good Sites," leaders in the online news industry discussed the most pressing issues affecting new media ethics and offered suggestions for how to deal with gray areas between what's probably right and what's definitely wrong in editorial decision making.

Moderators Janice Castro, assistant dean of Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism, and Elizabeth Osder, director of global product development for Yahoo! Overture Services, started the conversation by focusing on what they called the "seven digital sins," which cover issues ranging from the problems of accidental publishing, abuse of digital tools and images, corrections policy, inappropriately placed ads and increased reader scrutiny.

Instead of preaching to the audience about the do's and don'ts of online journalism, Castro and Osder facilitated an open conversation where the group could discuss real-life issued they confronted in their own newsrooms.

Osder said she thought the panel was the best way to get the issues out in the open and reach real conclusions.

"[We] can put together a panel, but really everyone encounters these issues. Maybe we can hash some out here," said Osder.

Corrections policies dominated much of the discussion. Castro said many news organizations have no formal corrections policy for their online operation.

"It's easy to correct things online and never leave a record," she said "But you need a corrections policy because it's at the heart of the credibility of your website."

Steve Fox of washingtonpost.com said he could recall a few instances where the corrections policy was not clearly defined.

"We have a stringent corrections policy at the newspaper, but we don't have an exclusive way to handle errors made online," he said.

He recalled an error made in the days following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, when washingtonpost.com erroneously ran a headline stating that an SUV had been found at Ground Zero with four or five people still alive in it.

When the story proved false, which was discovered half an hour after it was posted on the website, Fox immediately took it down. He said the example illustrates the question of how to deal with errors of that proportion on the web. Should he have run a correction on it instead of pulling the entire story?

Bob Ossworth of Reuters suggested using a corrections page where readers can go to see both the "mistakes we made and the corrected version of the story."

Ossworth added that the "Internet was made for masochists who want to pay, and pay and pay for their mistakes."

Arlene Getz of Newsweek.com said her shop handles mistakes by running a correction at the bottom of a story, with an anchor tag to the part of the text that has been corrected. This allows readers to read the corrected story, but also go back and see where the mistake was made.

Another major issue discussed was the question of whether or not to run graphic photos. It was the overall consensus of the group that photos that cannot run in the paper are sometimes OK to run online, though how far editors are willing to go depends on the publication. Most said that when they decide to run a slide show of graphic images, they put it behind a splash page that advises the audience on the disturbing images.

Mark Hinojosa of The Chicago Tribune said he thought that running certain photos was part of the duty of a journalist.

"We create a fiction when we [don't] do this. If you don't run a war photo when war is going on, you do a disservice. War is not antiseptic," he said.

Bill Grueskin from the Wall Street Journal online agreed and added that journalists owe it to their readers to provide good information, including content that some might find objectionable.

"There's a tremendous amount of content out there that readers ought to have access to, and they shouldn't have to Google like crazy to find it," he said.

Osder ended the panel reminding the audience that with the advent of interactivity and online news comes a new age of accountability. She said reporters should look at this as an exciting opportunity to improve the news.

"We really have to find a way to make journalism better," she said "Instead of looking at [interactivity] as annoying, it's a way to improve the craft."