A quick note pecked on my phone from the ONA conference in San Francisco…

At the end of this morning’s “Business of Collaboration” session, I had the chance to ask a panel of editors, “Why have you only talked about how you collaborate with other news outlets? Are there particular ethical concerns about generating stories and data with non-profits, local governments, advocacy groups?”

I thought it would be a tricky question to answer, but it wasn’t: “Yes, there are ethical concerns and they’re not ones we can compromise on” (I’m paraphrasing ProPublica’s editor).

I followed up: “So if a mayor in upstate New York asked Abrahm Lustgarten to analyze the fracking data the town couldn’t, ProPublica wouldn’t collaborate with the mayor?” His answer was accommodating but clear, that a journalistic outfit still has to remain removed to ensure impartiality, but they could cite the data and would still need to compare it to what the company doing the fracking would provide.

He’s right, but strangely, it’s a little jarring from the Center’s experience that news organizations would never feel 100% ethical partnering with anything other than another news org, that is, a partner that subscribes to the exact same code. We think of ourselves as moral and fair, and we’ve always considered news to be a subset of civic media, but this is the first time in four years at the Center that I’ve been confronted with the reality that we aren’t just different from news orgs because of our experimental, long-term tech focus but because to do *our* job helping *particular* communities address their information needs, we necessarily have to choose sides in way even forward-thinking news orgs won’t.