(Credit: University of Arkansas)

The news is breaking, other media outlets are hitting the airways. Your editors are screaming but you haven’t verified the facts yet. What do you do?

Critical steps are faced by reporters when they are breaking news or when they are dealing with vulnerable sources who require privacy. Those issues, and more, will be addressed by the University of Arkansas’s journalism ethics workshop Nov. 7.

The free event will be moderated by Newslab.org Deborah Potter, who is a Visiting Distinguished Professor of Ethics in Journalism for the school.

“Deborah Potter’s format for the morning will be a roundtable dialogue analyzing a scenario based on current ethics issues. The half-day seminar is designed for news media professionals in print, broadcast and online; faculty; students; and interested members of the community,” the university’s website says.

Potter told iMediaEthics more about the workshop.

“Our focus will be on breaking news, and specifically how journalists can made good ethical decisions on deadline under competitive pressure,” she said.

Potter said the workshop will discuss privacy on social media, “interview ground rules” related to on- and off-the-record conversations, paying for content, and fact checking.

Registration for the event is due Nov. 5.

Last year was the first ethics workshop and was named for that year’s visiting professor, Gene Foreman.