Database

The DIACOMET project will not only develop its own guidelines for good communication conduct, it also offers a systematic collection of existing codes of ethics.

Until today, research on journalistic codes of ethics mostly focused on general documents at the professional level, and other ethical documents have largely been neglected by empirical studies. To address new ethical challenges of the digital media world, media organisations update their in-house guidelines with new practice-oriented instructions. The DIACOMET project attends to this shortcoming by providing a systematic inventory of different codes of ethics and guidelines for all kinds of public communication, targeting stakeholders such as journalists, PR professionals, advertisers, digital platform operators as well as media users. Examples of such documents from all countries represented in the project are made accessible for the first time in a comprehensive online database.

As of September 2024, the DIACOMET database contains a total of 408 documents. Thanks to systematic indexing, it is possible to filter the database according to keywords including the name of the code, the originator, country, year of creation, and type of code. Automated translations of all documents facilitate full-text searches in English. The database will offer both a valuable point of reference for all stakeholders with an interest in the norms and values of public communication, and form the basis of a systematic comparative analysis of the documents included.

Further information on the concept of the DIACOMET database is available here.