PROV-10 · Newsroom AI standards

Draft the AI standards document your own newsroom would actually vote to adopt — including the part everyone skips, which is what happens when someone breaks it.

Your publication's existing ethics or style policy. Published AI standards from newsrooms that have released theirs, read and cited rather than copied. The real practices in your newsroom today, gathered honestly — what people are already doing with these tools, which is the thing the document has to govern. The staff who would have to live under it.

Copying another newsroom's document and changing the name, producing rules that do not match your tools, staff, or deadlines. Writing only prohibitions, so the document is ignored by everyone who finds a legitimate use. No enforcement section, which makes it a statement rather than a standard. Never showing it to the staff before declaring it adopted. Rules so vague that every disputed case is still a judgment call — which is the failure that makes standards documents useless.

A standards document plus its adoption record: the permitted, permitted-with-disclosure, and prohibited uses, each specific enough to settle a real case; the disclosure requirements with wording and placement; the enforcement path naming who decides, what the consequences are, and how an appeal works; staff feedback recorded with what changed in response; and a review date, because these will need revision within the year.

CT: writing a rule specific enough to settle a dispute. CR: drafting for the newsroom you have. CO: staff review is the instrument; disagreement is the data. CM: a document people will read to the end. CZ: the reader the standards exist to protect.

A standards editor, newsroom leader, or media-law-aware adviser reviews the enforcement section. Standing instruction: reject a document with no enforcement path and no review date. School-supervised.

R1: one newsroom, one document. R2: each rule traceable to a real practice or case. R3: comparator is the existing policy. R4: ambiguous cases addressed rather than avoided. R5: staff read it and could apply it. R6: prohibitions are specific and justified.

(a) Another newsroom's document with the name changed. (b) Rules with no consequence, no decision-maker, and no review date.

Lane A immediately (journalism capstone or student publication leadership project). No verified credit claim.