Know your writers' agendas and disclose them.

Columnist Armstrong Williams touched off furious discussions about ethics in newsrooms across the country.

Tribune Media Services terminated his contract when it learned Williams was under contract with the Bush administration agency to promote its No Child Left Behind education law. USA Today reported Williams took two hundred forty thousand dollars to promote education reform on his TV and radio shows.

Editor & Publisher also reported that Williams also had discussed the law four times in 2004.

Journalists were near unanimous about this most fundamental violation of trust with readers--that the writers' allegiance is to the reader, not some hidden special interest.

But who is responsible for keeping that tacit promise? And how do you keep it?

Here are highlights of a discussion among the NCEW Ethics Committee members:

Always the editor is responsible for touching the ethical line with the writer, members say, whether that is an editor of a single newspaper's editorial page or of a syndicate. But even the most vigilant editor can be hoodwinked. Tribune Media Services was right to act decisively in the Williams case, which is egregious. Even if he agreed with Bush's education reform efforts, taking money to promote them compromised his credibility. Watch out! He says he'll be self-syndicating.

Tribune Media's immediate termination of Williams's contract was a strong statement of the syndicate's values.

Trained journalists ought to have a good grounding in how to avoid conflicts of interest, but some don't. Williams defended himself by saying he had never gone to journalism school. But, as a couple of NCEW groupserv participants noted, he should have known the difference between right and wrong in this instance if he'd only gone to Sunday school.

And sometimes there are gray areas--where a conflict sneaks in.

Editors must stay alert to their writers' interests and associations and ask questions. For unsolicited op-ed submissions, discern why the writer is interested in the topic. Clarify your newspaper's values by drafting a policy about conflicts of interest. Share it with your writers. Maybe even have them sign a form saying they've read it.

In the case of op-ed columns submitted by--or requested from--a writer with an obvious stake in the issue: Disclose, disclose, disclose. A drug company executive who writes a print-worthy column defending the cost of prescription drugs would have special insight into the issue--her job would be a credential attesting to that expertise.

If you have non-staff columnists who write for your pages regularly, disclose their profession routinely. A developer might be a fantastic political commentator but turns in a column about a land-use controversy; or a lawyer who writes great satire might decide to write against tort reform. You might not want to run those columns when the conflict arises. Or if you do, be explicit to readers about the writer's potential conflict of interest.

Disclosure covers a lot of sins. Readers can judge the credibility for themselves but only if they have the information.