Our Principles and Policies

Overview

The Red Line Project, produced by students in Mike Reilley’s journalism classes at the University of Illinois-Chicago, are committed to journalistic integrity and credibility. Both are essential to its reputation as a trusted neighborhood news source in Chicago. This reputation is rooted in the conduct of our editorial staff.

As a digital publication striving for an audience-centered culture, we openly post our principles and policies on fairness, diversity, our reporting and editing process, corrections and much more. We take them seriously and have linked them off multiple points of each of our stories. Besides what we list here, our reporters also adhere to the Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics.

This site has no political connection or agenda, and it is not affiliated with the Chicago Transit Authority or the former CBS TV series, The Red Line. | Read more about how these policies were developed in this case study from Trusting News.

---

Editorial Code of Conduct and Guiding Principles

We’re college students, and we know we need to earn your trust. But if you doubt anything you read on this site, take the time to read this page on our guiding principles and policies. We take accuracy seriously. Our stories, data and multimedia are fact-checked, edited and vetted. As documenters of history’s rough draft, we admit when we’ve made a mistake and move quickly to correct them.

The credibility of the stories and multimedia you find on this site rests on solid research, clear, intelligent writing and maintaining a reputation for honesty, accuracy, fairness and balance. To these ends, the following rules and principles apply:

• The Red Line project will seek to provide reasonable accounts of competing views in any controversy so as to enable readers to make up their own minds.
• It is unacceptable to invent or falsify a quote, source, anecdote, detail or anything else pertaining to the news we cover.
• News photos and videos must be real images captured by a camera, not created or altered. They may be edited for sharpness, color balance or cropping, but only minor adjustments, per the recommendations of the National Press Photographers Association Code of Ethics and the Society of Professional Journalists.
• In dealing with people who are emotionally vulnerable and unaccustomed to talking to reporters, the Red Line Project will take care to respect their dignity and feelings.

---

Read more: To be fully transparent, our writers each semester talk about their reporting approach on a series of Red Line Project reporters’ roundtable podcasts. You can listen to them here or find them embedded at the end of many of their stories.

---

---

Fairness Policy

As journalists working to ensure balance and fairness, we strive to:

• Be factually accurate
• Keep in mind our own values, cultural biases and preconceptions, and avoid imposing them on others.
• Ensure that our word choices and the overall tone of the stories are fair and neutral.
• Present a diversity of views.
• Frame stories fairly and openly, in particular the critical sections that make an impression on readers — that is, in the lead and at the end.
• Ensure there are no surprises in the story for our subjects. They should have an opportunity before publication to know the gist of the story and respond to any meaningful details or accusations.
• Give subjects ample time to respond, generally speaking, a minimum of 24 hours.
• Include a timely response from subjects. Listen with an open mind and portray their point of view in a straightforward manner.
• Reach out to allies or sympathetic parties and scour the public record to understand the point of view of subjects who are unwilling or unable to talk.
• Make a sincere effort to reconcile conflicting information if our subjects’ point of view does not square with other data points in a story.

---

Data and Transparency: We Show Our Work

We have a commitment to “Show our Work” when working with data in our reporting. We provide links to the research and datasets we use in reporting a story. We link to datasets directly from our charts, maps and infographics.

We may run an explanatory story to show how the data was collected, cleaned, analyzed and visualized. We may share that process through a short video, audio interview with the reporter or a Twitter thread.

We also provide searchable databases, cite data sources and provide links to data portals so our readers can access the raw data. We also will provide conflicting data reports on various issues (COVID-19, etc.) when we discover it in our reporting, and tell the reader when we don’t complete data. Watch this video explaining our reporting process for data stories:

---

 Your Rights as an Interviewee

We train our reporters in good interviewing tactics. The reporters must identify themselves and get your permission to record the interview, and make it clear that what you say will appear on RedLineProject.news and our various social platforms.

During or before an interview, you have the right to:

• Request basic information about the reporter and the story. You can ask the reporters about what stories they cover, the deadline they are working under as well as the general gist of the news story they are writing. Credible journalists should have no problem sharing this information.
• Ask the reporters if they are recording the interviews. They’re required by law in most states to get your permission to be recorded.
• Provide information at a later time. If you are not 100 percent sure of an answer, say so. Tell the reporters you would like to double-check your information and get back to them. They’ll appreciate your dedication to accuracy.

Interviewees do not typically have the right to:

• Demand questions in advance. Journalists may share questions or the general point of the interview with you, but you cannot demand to know all of the content of the interview in advance.
• Review the story before it runs. Occasionally a journalist will ask you to review a quote or statistic for accuracy, but never the entire story.
• Ask for another reporter to do the story. This will not only irritate the reporter but will reduce the likelihood you would ever get coverage from our media outlet again.

---

Diversity: Guidelines for Inclusive Journalism

Chicago is a city of neighborhoods — 77 to be exact. And those neighborhoods blend together a rich mix of diversity in race, gender, age, sexual orientation and more.

Bias can present itself in everything from beat structure to headlines and cutlines to assignments, choice of sources, story and photo approach, play and organization. Bias can blind journalists to a full understanding of a subject and rob readers of important information.

The Red Line Project relies on established tools and safeguards against bias, among them maintaining a diverse staff, the use of multiple sources, multiple layers of editing to help ensure a complete report, and consistent staff training and education.

The most important safeguard, however, is a journalist’s humility before a subject and an understanding that no one person or entity holds the truth.  One of our missions is to make our storytelling and our classroom inclusive on issues of race, gender, age and more.

Our faculty and students strive to create and maintain a working atmosphere where staffers can feel comfortable raising concerns about coverage they view as biased or otherwise offensive.

Our student reporters also work to find diverse sources in their reporting, both in people who are impacted by the issues we write about and expert sources.

---

Credits: These policies were derived from TrustingNews.org, Seattle Times, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, San Francisco Chronicle, San Diego Union-Tribune, The Globe and Mail and our own blood, sweat and tears.

---

The Process

Note: This graphic outlines only the reporting process and does not include the copy editing and fact-checking process built into step 6.