Ethics

Journalistic Ethics and Practices

AI-generated header image (Gemini/Nano Banana Pro) representing journalistic ethics and institutional integrity.

By Peter C. Frank | Editor-in-Chief

(Updated April 23, 2026)

Our Mandate

The Bloomfield Community Dispatch operates with a singular mandate: to provide the residents of Bloomfield, CT, with rigorous, evidence-based reporting on municipal operations, public safety, and civic transparency. We answer to no political establishment—only to the residents, the taxpayers, and the unvarnished truth.

To maintain the highest level of institutional integrity, we adhere to the following journalistic ethics and practices:

1. Editorial Independence

Our editorial judgments are made independently and are never influenced by political entities, corporate interests, or financial supporters. We do not alter, delay, or suppress factual reporting to placate any individual, administration, or organization. We recognize that investigations are dynamic; as new documentary evidence emerges, we continually update our reporting to reflect the most accurate and comprehensive truth.

2. Sourcing and Fact-Checking

All reporting is grounded in verifiable facts and primary source documentation (e.g., FOIA records, municipal audits, recorded public meetings, and legal filings). We do not publish unverified rumors. When quoting public officials or individuals, we provide exact context and do not rely on cherry-picked data. When appropriate and safe, targets of our investigations are offered a fair opportunity to respond before publication.

3. Anonymous Sourcing

We prefer all sources to go on the record. We will grant anonymity only to a source who provides vital, verifiable intelligence regarding municipal operations and faces a credible threat of retaliation, termination, or physical harm. We will always verify the information from an anonymous source through secondary documentation before publication whenever possible.

4. Corrections and Updates Policy

We are committed to the unvarnished, verifiable truth. If a factual error is made, it will be corrected as swiftly as possible. All substantive corrections will be clearly noted at the top or bottom of the original article, detailing exactly what was changed and when.

5. Conflict of Interest

Our editorial staff and contributors are prohibited from covering issues where they have a direct, undisclosed financial or familial conflict of interest. Any unavoidable overlap will be explicitly disclosed to the reader within the text of the report.

6. Financial and Donor Transparency

The Dispatch is an independent entity. We may accept subscriptions or donations from community members to cover operational costs, technical infrastructure, FOIA fees, payroll, community support initiatives, and to maintain operational reserves. However, financial contributors have zero input, influence, or advanced knowledge regarding our editorial coverage. We will not accept funding from any entity attempting to steer or influence our reporting.

7. Ethical Artificial Intelligence Policy

The Dispatch utilizes artificial intelligence to support, not replace, our journalism. Alongside our bespoke forensic systems, we employ industry-standard AI tools widely utilized by major global news organizations to process and analyze large volumes of public data. These systems assist us in the following capacities:

• Generating rapid, automated transcripts of audio and video recordings, such as municipal meetings and public hearings.
• Cross-referencing massive document dumps (such as FOIA productions) and extracting key entities, timelines, and connections from thousands of pages of raw data.
• Organizing and searching our investigative notes and ideas.
• Outlining and structuring complex articles.
• Copyediting for grammar, sentence flow, and style.
• Double-checking figures and basic calculations within municipal audits.
• Flagging potentially biased or editorializing language against common journalism ethics standards.
• Generating technical code (such as HTML or table markup) to present information online.

AI is never used to fabricate facts, conduct original reporting, interview sources, decide what is newsworthy, or draft final articles. We provide all underlying information and make all editorial decisions ourselves. Every story is independently reviewed, revised, and approved by our human editorial staff, and we assume full legal and ethical responsibility for its accuracy and fairness.

Generative AI is utilized to create specific visual assets (such as our political satire headers) and to assist with multimedia production. Whenever images or other multimedia content are generated or edited using AI, they are explicitly tagged and clearly labeled for the reader.

Ultimately, the Dispatch views artificial intelligence as we would any advanced instrument: its moral impact is determined entirely by the operator's intent. Like any tool in a journalist’s toolbox, AI can deliver profound societal benefits as well as significant harm. Therefore, it is incumbent upon us—both as a publication and as a society—to proactively cultivate its positive applications and enact robust ethical safeguards. We must ensure this technology takes root and flourishes in the gardens of transparency, truth, and civic good, actively denying malicious actors the opportunity to cultivate it in the soil of deception.