Guiding Principles for Handling Eyewitness Media

These guiding principles were developed in response to a number of requests from newsrooms looking for best practice advice in the ethical and responsible use of eyewitness media.

If you are already familiar with these suggestions then we hope they will serve as a useful reminder of issues to consider. If not, then we hope they will at least spark further discussion with your colleagues and peers. Our aim is that elements of these principles will be lifted and used to inform internal policies. We would also like them to be included as part of newsroom training and journalism school curricula.

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The development of these guiding principles was a collaborative process. We prepared a draft outline based on our recent research findings and shared it with selected journalists who source and report visual content captured at the scene of news events, everyday. We asked for feedback on what we had missed and sought confirmation that our recommendations were realistic.

We acknowledge that every story is different and these consultations helped us hone the language to reflect the pressure that journalists face in the newsroom when a story breaks.