Ethics and Corrections Policies

The Monterey County Weekly (and Monterey County Now and Salinas Valley Now and all affiliated publications) abide by the Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics. You can read it in full on SPJ’s website. 

The four main pillars are as follows:

• Seek the truth and report it. Ethical journalism should be accurate and fair. Journalists should be honest and courageous in gathering, reporting and interpreting information.
• Minimize harm. Ethical journalism treats sources, subjects, colleagues and members of the public as human beings deserving of respect. 

• Act independently. The highest and primary obligation of ethical journalism is to serve the public. 

• Be accountable and transparent. Ethical journalism means taking responsibility for one's work and explaining one’s decisions to the public.

That fourth item includes our corrections policy. If we publish factually incorrect information, we immediately strive to understand how and why it happened and where our systems failed that allowed inaccurate information to be printed. 

Immediately after learning about an error, we correct the digital version and note the correction in the same story in order to be transparent and publish a record of what was changed. 

If the inaccuracy ran in print, we publish a correction in the print edition the following week noting the correction. (Corrections appear in the “Letters” section, as needed.) 

This policy applies only to factual errors; for differences of opinion, we invite all readers, including subjects of published work, to comment online and/or submit letters to the editor for the print edition.