These guidelines describe the values, standards and practices we pursue in our journalism, our teaching and our fundraising to support our mission. It is a living document that we expect will mature and evolve with our work. It is broken into three sections: core values, business practices and privacy.

Photographer Bill Frakes, whose career has included shooting for the likes of Sports Illustrated and Coca-Cola, has been removed from his position as visiting professor at the University of Nebraska – Lincoln. The decision was made by the university after it judged that a report claiming sexual harassment against Frakes was credible. News of the allegations first surfaced in documents obtained by The World-Herald.

According to notes made during the OIEC’s investigation, and sent anonymously to PDN, Bill Frakes was alleged to have commented on the appearance of female students’ appearance but not the appearance of male students; scrolled through photos of “scantily clad” women on his phone while driving with female students in his car; referred to female editors he worked with as “bitches” but “did not speak negatively about male editors in the same tone”; and told students he was not a person “to ‘piss off’ and he could ‘end their careers.’”
Frakes has previously taught at the University of Miami, the University of Florida, the University of Kansas, and at several workshops.

The National Press Photographers Association (NPPA) has added an anti-harassment standard to its code of ethics, addressing not just photographic practice but the behavior of photographers in dealing with people beyond with the camera.

In a test designed by Nightingale and taken by more than 700 men and women, participants could tell an image was faked only 60 percent of the time — a little better than if they guessed completely at random. And with the correct picks, only 45 percent of participants could pinpoint what had been changed in a photo. (Men were slightly more adept at finding the specific change.)

Here are some questions to help you decide what, where or whether to broadcast, publish or share visually explicit photos and video.

For PDN’s issue on Ethics and Photography (July), we interviewed five photojournalists and a veteran editor about the principles that guide the choices they’ve made while covering stories, and how they view their responsibilities to both subjects and audience. Their perspectives vary, and the topics they discussed are wide-ranging. Excerpts can be found in PDN‘s July issue, and we are also posting full text of their interviews here. Click below to read the full interviews.

Now the social media network is hoping to patch things up with what is essentially a new tag for sponsored posts. The tag will initially be available to Instagram users with business profiles and will prominently disclose the fact that they’re taking money.

But for outsiders to any culture, the situation remains tricky. Take the British photographer Jimmy Nelson, whose “Before They Pass Away” was published as a lush large-format coffee table book in 2013 and has since become ubiquitous in bookstores around the world. “Before They Pass Away” is made explicitly in homage to Edward S. Curtis, whom Nelson often cites as a hero. It proceeds from the same idea as Curtis’s: that certain peoples, on the verge of disappearing, must be captured in illustrative, archetypal photographs

In preparation for PDN’s July issue on Ethics, we asked photojournalist Victor J. Blue to explain what he does and doesn’t do to gain access, how he avoids conflicts of interest, his thoughts on fairness vs. neutrality, and the “Define the Relationship” talk he has with his subjects.  

The rape itself was horrific enough. In March, half a dozen boys and young men lured a 15-year-old girl to a house in Chicago and sexually assaulted her there, brutally and repeatedly. But what made this episode singularly appalling was the attackers’ streaming their crime on Facebook Live. From a count posted with the video, investigators deduced that about 40 people watched in real time. Yet not one of the viewers bothered to summon the authorities.

Yes, the attack is news. But does replaying footage of victims for hours or turning over the entire homepage to the story, as CNN, Fox News and Breitbart did, elevate the public understanding of why terrorism is committed or how to stop it? Or is it just lazy and sensationalist tabloid journalism, blowing the murder of 22 people out of proportion to stoke fear?