COLUMBIA, Mo., Aug. 10 /PRNewswire/ -- The Society of American Business
Editors and Writers has been awarded $25,000 from Ethics and Excellence in
Journalism Foundation to launch several ethics-based initiatives.
    The grant is the second awarded this year to SABEW from the Oklahoma
City- based journalism foundation. In May, the group received a challenge
grant funded by Ethics and Excellence as well as the James L. and John S.
Knight Foundation, and the Ford Foundation. That grant provides for up to
$25,000 in one-to-one matching funds raised by SABEW before May 31, 2007.
    The latest grant will help launch a re-examination of ethical
consideration that today's business journalists face. Planned initiatives
include workshop seminars, publications and web content.
    "SABEW has long played a leading role in terms of ethics in business
journalism, and this grant will help augment our efforts on that front,"
said SABEW President Dave Kansas, Money and Investing editor for the Wall
Street Journal. "It's more important than ever for journalists to operate
with the highest level of ethics, and we're dedicated to that mission."
    SABEW was founded in 1964 to improve the ethics and professionalism of
business reporters. The organization has 3,200 professional members who are
primarily working journalists in the U.S. or Canada.
    Martha Steffens, the SABEW Chair in Business and Financial Journalism
at the University of Missouri, said the grant helps SABEW to update its
ethics code in light of changing technology and changing pressures on
financial journalists.
    "The advent of e-mail interviewing, attack bloggers and real-time
journalism have all changed the playing field for journalists and sources,"
she said. The grant will help SABEW host ethics sessions at the
organization's spring and fall conferences, Steffens said. This October,
the group will host two-hour session on ethics will include panelists
Barney Calame, public editor of the New York Times; Matthew Winkler,
executive editor of Bloomberg; and Dan Colarusso, business editor of the
New York Post.
    There will be a larger meeting on ethics at the SABEW annual conference
in Anaheim in May, which is an extension of work that began in 2003 with
funds donated in the name of former SABEW president and founder Gary Klott,
who died in 2002.
    SABEW is a 501(c)3 organization based in Columbia at the Missouri
School of Journalism. Ethics and Excellence Foundation was founded in 1982
through the largesse of newspaper owner Edith Kinney Gaylord of Oklahoma
City, and is dedicated to the improvement of journalism.
    The New York-based Ford Foundation is funded by bequests from Edsel and
Henry Ford, and is an international philanthropy dedicated to causes that
strengthen democratic values and advance human achievement. The Knight
Foundation, based in Miami, donates to journalism organizations and to
community projects in designated cities.

Link to this page: