This summer, Margaret Sullivan, the executive director of the Craig Newmark Center for Journalism Ethics and Security at Columbia Journalism School, and her colleague Julie Gerstein published a series of essays in CJR exploring what a new generation of journalism ethics might look like, as the media industry evolves.

“It is conventional wisdom among journalists that while the world around us changes, our ethics do not,” Sullivan wrote, in her introduction to the project. “Yet a fresh look at our standards and practices seems a worthwhile pursuit at this moment.”

Sullivan joins The Kicker to talk about what it means for journalism ethics to evolve with the times—and how she views critical questions around transparency, media bias, and whether the public editor role might make its return.

Read More:

*“A New Look at Journalism Ethics”—A special project from CJR

*“Is Objectivity Still Worth Pursuing?”

*“What Do Journalists Owe Their Sources—and Their Audiences?”

*“Can AI Tools Meet Journalistic Standards?”

On Thursday, a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order barring federal agents from using riot control measures like tear gas to disperse journalists seeking to cover protests outside the Broadview ICE processing center, near Chicago.

The order was the result of a lawsuit filed earlier in the week by several Chicago news organizations and reporters who had been injured or detained while trying to cover ICE activity in the city.

Stephanie Lulay is the co–executive editor and cofounder of one of them, Block Club, a seven-year-old digital nonprofit that seems almost perfectly built for this moment. She and reporter Francia García Hernández join The Kicker to talk about what they’ve seen around Chicago recently, and about what it’s like reporting on a city under siege.

Read more:

*The lawsuit filed by Block Club and other Chicago-area news outlets.

*Some of Francia’s coverage for Block Club.

*A September incident during which a Block Club freelancer was shot by pepper balls while covering protests at Broadview.

*Dave Levinthal for CJR on how ICE has been routinely ignoring FOIA requests from reporters—including one from Block Club.

In 2017, Elle Reeve, then a correspondent for Vice News, became a household name when she reported from the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia—as neo-Nazis marched with burning torches and a white supremacist drove his car into a crowd of counterprotesters.

Reeve has developed an expertise on what you might call the fringe beat, covering shadowy internet groups and right-wing political movements for CNN.

Those worlds collided when a very online man assassinated the right-wing political star Charlie Kirk in a meme-drenched attack that left much of the media world mystified. Reeve joins The Kicker to help make sense of it all.

Read More:

*Elle recently spoke about interviewing extreme figures with CNN’s Donie O'Sullivan

*Black Pill, Elle’s 2024 book on her journeys into the “darkest corners of the internet”

*“Charlottesville: Race and Terror,” the 2017 Vice News documentary