NBC Sports Bay Area's News Standards and Publishing Principles

These standards are pillars upon which we operate when navigating editorial decisions on a day-to-day basis at NBC Sports Bay Area

At NBC Sports Bay Area, we aim to create trustworthy and transparent journalism and cover stories that matter to the Bay Area region and the many audiences who live here. Our newsroom follows certain standards and principles when investigating, writing, and building our news coverage to ensure accuracy, fairness, and quality.

The standards described here aren’t meant to be a comprehensive manual to any ethical question that might surface when covering the news. Instead, these standards, also followed by our sister stations NBC Bay Area and Telemundo Area de la Bahía are pillars upon which we operate when navigating editorial decisions on a day-to-day basis.

Accuracy and fairness

Accuracy and fairness are fundamental principles of journalism. As we gather information and images from various sources, we make every effort to verify and ensure both. 

Accuracy requires that we ensure all facts are correct and presented in the proper context. Accuracy also extends to the images we use and the need to verify them. If we do not have the full context of a photo or piece of video, we aim to make that clear to our readers.

We also aim to ensure fairness in our coverage by keeping an open mind about a story from start to finish. We make good-faith efforts to seek out and present all relevant facts and points of view. We always attempt to contact the subjects of our reporting for comment, providing them with sufficient detail of our report and allowing them reasonable time to respond. 

In the absence of an immediate response, we include past statements where relevant. In those instances when we decide to report on allegations first reported by another trusted news source, fairness dictates we attempt to get our own comment from those criticized or accused of wrongdoing. Until we get our own comment, we typically report (with attribution) any relevant response given to another news organization.