Last year a cab driver taking me to Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism asked why I was going there. I said I was going to discuss journalism ethics. She smiled and said, "The ethics of journalism--are there any?"

Many people do think there is a distinct dearth of journalism ethics, especially in the wake of several high-profile cases of unethical or inappropriate practices. The prime and most-talked-about example of recent times, of course, involves the Los Angeles Times' own agonizing struggle with ethics which I will look at in some detail later.

The press unquestionably faces serious ethical problems in this era of intense competition for media dollars fueled by the internet, the proliferating cable television outlets, and the merger of media giants like America Online and Time Warner.

We all know the facts: the mainstream press has become more sensationalized, and it worries less about invasion of privacy or verifying allegations of wrongdoing before publishing or broadcasting them. Standards in deciding what is fit or fair to publish or broadcast have been lowered.

Virtually no ethical standards are followed in some cases of electronic media.

In discussing mainstream print media, though, it is important to cite some encouraging signs as well as the problems. That was brought home to me last year when conducting a seminar for a group of Southern California journalism students in Washington. My lectures and the lectures of speakers I had invited for the seminar tended to dwell on the sins and shortcomings of today's journalism.

Our classroom approach stressing these problems was so unrelentingly negative, I worried that we were turning students against journalism as a career. Finally, I felt compelled to point out that good journalism, especially public service journalism, still flourishes; that much of journalism today is better than it was 20 or 30 years ago; that today's young journalists are better educated, better paid, and better prepared to report on complex issues.

Moreover, press organizations, as well as some foundations and universities, are spending a lot of money and effort searching for ways to make journalism more ethical and more meaningful in not only uncovering society's problems, but in engaging citizens in seeking solutions to the problems.

Here I acknowledge a personal interest in the subject of foundations' efforts. For the past year I have served as chairman of the Advisory Committee of the Pew Center for Civic Journalism. As many of you know, the Center is an arm of the Pew Charitable Trusts and promotes the news media's role in helping to engage people in discussing and solving problems in their communities.

Civic journalism has widespread support among journalists, but it also has critics. The criticism carries with it questions of journalism ethics. I think it is important to answer the criticism and to think a little about civic journalism and what it is and what it does and does not do.

Those who attended last year's lecture on ethics here may recall that James M. Naughton, president of the Poynter Institute, sharply criticized civic journalism. Jim Naughton is a great journalist and a long-time friend of mine, and I am sure he is doing a great job at the Poynter Institute, which he acknowledged has worked with the Pew Center on civic journalism projects.

Nevertheless, I believe he and other critics are dead wrong in their criticism of civic journalism as practiced by the Pew Center and its many news media partners. It would be too time consuming and too boring to try to rebut Naughton's critique point by point. It is important, though, to address what I see as his main point-and one that other critics cite-that the Pew Center pays editors to cover news or to create news beats. It does not. What it does do is award contracts for relatively small funding to help print and broadcast news organizations experiment with ways to connect to their communities and engage their citizens in problem solving.

The Pew Center has initiated no newsroom projects. News organizations apply for the grants to finance their own projects. Grants are then selected by a subcommittee of the Pew Center's Advisory Board. Average funding is only about $28,000 per project. Guidelines specifically bar recipients from using the grant to finance normal newsroom costs--for reporters, news hole or air time.

Another vocal critic of civic journalism has been Brian Williams of NBC. He urges that reporters "report problems; don't try to solve them. There are other people who have that job." Where in the world has Brian Williams been? Over the years some of the best public service journalism has involved highlighting potential solutions as well as exposing problems. Maybe if the Pew Center had called it public service journalism instead of civic journalism there would not have been so much criticism or controversy.

It sometimes takes time for a reporter to realize and understand that the press has a responsibility to go beyond exposing problems and to look for solutions. I know it took time for me to realize the press has that responsibility.

As a young Atlanta Constitution reporter years ago, I investigated cases of malpractice and other wrongdoing at Milledgeville State Hospital in Georgia, then the world's largest mental institution. The hospital had 12,500 patients and only 48 doctors--and 12 of the doctors had alcoholic or drug addiction backgrounds. Several had been mental patients the hospital hired off the ward. A nurse performed major surgery on patients. A staff doctor funded by pharmaceutical firms gave experimental drugs to patients without the knowledge of their relatives or guardians. In short, Milledgeville was a snake pit, a warehouse for humans.

After the Constitution published a series I wrote about the scandal, an editor assigned me to go to Kansas to see how William and Karl Menninger had led a reform program that lifted Kansas from the bottom to the top nationally in state programs for treating the mentally ill. I was not too happy about the assignment. As an investigative reporter I saw my job as uncovering problems, not as seeking solutions to them.

But my editor was right and the Kansas trip taught me an important lesson about seeking solutions. The series I wrote about Kansas' reform program, entitled "Brains Before Bricks," meaning hire top personnel before erecting new buildings, became the blueprint for a great reform program of Georgia's institutions for the mentally ill.

In my opinion, that kind of public service reporting used to be much more common than it is today. While I cannot cite statistics to support that conclusion, I believe many editors and reporters today are so caught up in "gotcha" journalism that they often ignore any responsibility for seeking possible solutions as well as spotlighting problems.

In fact, one reason for establishing the Pew Center in 1993 was that polls showed that the public increasingly viewed the media as getting in the way of society solving its problems and that fewer people were reading newspapers or even listening to television news. Newspaper executives have been deeply worried about the trend, and they should be. The most recent polls show only about 25 percent of Americans get their news from newspapers.

One might ask-and I suppose some critics have not asked or found out-what are some of the characteristics of civic journalism. The Pew Center's executive director, Jan Schaffer, a former business editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer, describes civic journalism as "a broad label put on efforts by editors and news directors to try to do their jobs as journalists in ways that help to overcome people's sense of powerless and alienation." She lists these characteristics of civic journalism:

1) It seeks to expand the definition of "news" to cover consensus as well as conflict, to report about success stories as well as failures.

2) It seeks to frame stories in ways that are more relevant to people.

3) It seeks to treat ordinary people as players in a self-governing society, rather than as passive spectators of some civic freak show.

4) It does that by trying to provide entry points for people to recognize and act on their community issues.

Overall, the Pew Center has enjoyed enormous support and cooperation from the journalism community. It has come from print and broadcast media organizations and from universities throughout the country. Since 1994 more than 2,500 journalists have attended 33 workshops and more than 170 news organizations have participated in 92 civic journalism initiatives supported by the Center.

Major partners in the projects have included National Public Radio, the Radio and Television News Directors Foundation, The Public Broadcasting Service's (PBS) Democracy Project, the Kettering Foundation, the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communications, the National Association of Black Journalists, Investigative Reporters and Editors, and yes, the Poynter Institute.

Colleges and universities also have been major partners in many projects. For example, Boston University's radio and television stations worked with The Boston Globe on election projects. And Pacific Lutheran University's radio station joined with The Seattle Times and other media partners in several civic journalism initiatives. Kansas, Northwestern, Duke, Colorado State and the Universities of Tampa, South Florida, California at Berkeley, Wright State, Dayton and Cincinnati are among other educational institutions that have participated in projects.

Now, back to basic journalism ethics. I have been a journalist for more than 50 years, starting as an eighteen-year-old rookie right out of high school in 1947 with the Biloxi, Mississippi, Daily Herald. Looking back, I can tell you that for all of the media's hand wringing about ethics today-or what The Wall Street Journal termed its "navel-gazing"-mainstream journalism is more ethical today than it was in the past.

Long gone are the days when journalists routinely accepted expense-paid junkets and then wrote about the firms that financed the trips-or routinely wrote speeches for politicians and then reported on the speeches. That is not to say those things do not still happen. They may, but rarely and certainly not routinely.

Some time ago it was not uncommon for some reporters to accept gifts from political or business figures they covered. Nor was it likely in those days that a newsroom would rebel at the idea of a newspaper providing preferential editorial treatment to a major advertiser.

Such practices are extremely rare today and there is a strong stigma attached to them. A major reason is that many news organizations have codes of conduct barring the practices and most journalists themselves will not stand for such conduct. Journalists today are much more concerned about-and are ready to take steps to curb-conflicts of interest and the appearance of conflicts of interest.

That is certainly true at the Los Angeles Times. The Times' ethics case looms so large-and what happened when Times' journalists grappled with it was so extraordinary-that I want to discuss the case in some detail. It is a case so important that it has touched off discussions in newsrooms and journalism classrooms throughout the country and undoubtedly will wind up in journalism textbooks.

The way the Times responded to the Staples Center issue says a lot about the power of journalists themselves, if they are so inclined, to police ethics within their own organizations.

When journalism ethics involves not the conduct of reporters, but the conduct of management in tearing down the wall between a newspaper's advertising and editorial departments, the stakes are much higher, of course.

It is not in any way condoning the Times' conduct in the Staples case to point out that many newspapers have blurred the line between news and commerce, and that with the competition for the media dollar intensifying the pressure to mix commerce with editorial will intensify, too.

As Max Frankel pointed out in The New York Times, many newspapers already create special sections that guarantee advertisers a friendly "environment." Many newspapers also collaborate in promotions and community activities with the same politicians and business people they claim to be covering at arm's length.

A poll by Editor & Publisher magazine after the Staples case came to light showed that business executives at many other newspapers considered the Staples deal an acceptable practice. The survey of 165 editors and publishers found that 51 percent of publishers found the practice acceptable, but only 19 percent of editors agreed.

As most of you know, the Times' case involved the newspaper's Sunday magazine devoting an entire issue to the new Staples Center sports arena last October while secretly sharing the issue's advertising revenue with the Center. I say secretly sharing the profits because the arrangement remained hidden from most editors and reporters. It was hidden for good reason: It smacked of a conflict of interest that undermined the editorial credibility of the Times.

It is a fundamental rule that readers should always know what is for sale and what is not for sale in a newspaper, and no newspaper should ever provide news coverage for an event or an institution in which it has an interest without, at the very least, informing the readers of that interest.

In fact, I believe-and many other journalists believe-that while the Staples revenue-sharing deal was inappropriate, the Times could have spared itself much of the criticism it endured if the paper had simply notified its readers that that issue of its Sunday magazine was being published under a revenue-sharing deal.

Who blew the whistle on the Staples deal? Journalists. First, someone at the Times got wind of the deal, found it inappropriate, and leaked it to a columnist at an alternative weekly, New Times. The columnist wrote about it in provocative language in a column called "The Finger."

The main mission of "The Finger" is to give the finger to the Times-often basing its reports on inaccurate or incomplete or out-of-context information. So most people at the paper did not take The Finger's report about the Staples Center seriously.

But then The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal followed up by reporting on the revenue-sharing arrangement. That put the fat in the fire. The L. A. Times newsroom was in full rebellion. Three hundred reporters and editors signed a petition declaring the paper's integrity had been undermined and demanding that management apologize.

The editor, Michael Parks, and publisher, Kathryn Downing, called a staff meeting in the paper's cafeteria and were confronted by a hostile staff. Downing apologized profusely to the crowd that overflowed the cafeteria. She took full responsibility for the deal and acknowledged she had put the Times under a "horrific cloud."

But staffers were so upset they continued to bombard her with questions and even a suggestion she should consider going back to school to learn journalism. Humiliated, she finally said, "This is a major, major mistake, but I am publisher of the L. A. Times and I am staying the publisher of the L. A. Times. The question is how do I come up the learning curve faster."

The news staff demanded an in-house investigation. At first Parks, the editor, resisted, saying "We know what happened. I don't see anything more to discover."

Reporters soon lined up to sign a second petition circulating in the newsroom that demanded a thorough investigation of the Staples deal and any other deal that might have breached the wall between the advertising and editorial departments.

As the controversy raged, Otis Chandler, the Times' retired publisher who led the paper from mediocrity to greatness during a 20-year period, 1960 to 1980, weighed in. He telephoned Bill Boyarsky, the city editor, and dictated a long statement to the news staff expressing outrage at the Staples deal and denouncing the paper's management as "unbelievably stupid."

Chandler, still a major stockholder in Times-Mirror, the Times' parent company, declared the Times staffers had been "abused and misused." He declared a great newspaper could not be maintained when its top executives "have no newspaper experience at any level." Neither Downing nor Mark Willes, her predecessor as publisher who serves as chairman and chief executive officer of Times Mirror, had any prior newspaper experience.

Chandler's intervention had an electrifying effect. Hundreds of staffers cheered when Boyarsky read his statement in the newsroom. Photos of Chandler sprouted throughout the sprawling newsroom.

Pressure for a thorough investigation by the Times intensified and Michael Parks named David Shaw, the paper's media critic, to investigate. After a six-week investigation, Shaw wrote a damning-some say interminable-report. It ran about 30,000 words and took up a 14-page special section of the Times. His report was edited by George Cotliar, the paper's retired managing editor, a man known for journalism integrity and fierce independence. At his insistence the report was free of any review by the Times' current editors.

Both Downing, who approved the Staples deal, and Parks, who learned of the deal before the magazine was distributed but did nothing to stop circulation of it, were severely criticized by Shaw's report; so was Mark Willes.

Willes, after arriving in Los Angeles to become chairman and CEO of Times Mirror, had sent shock waves through the field of journalism by saying he would "take a bazooka if necessary" to break down the wall between the editorial and advertising departments. He later declared he would never endanger the editorial integrity of the Times, but his critics said his lack of newspaper experience had led both to the "bazooka" comment and to the Staples deal. After the deal surfaced, Willes was quoted as saying that kind of thing happens when a newspaper has as publisher a person with no newspaper experience.

The Shaw report, in addition to detailing the Staples deal, cited several other incidents where the line between the Times' news and advertising departments had been blurred. For example, news staffers had been expected to line up their sources as speakers at Times-sponsored special events designed to make money and promote the paper, and the events were extensively covered by the paper. In addition, a sales commission had been paid to the Times for books sold when buyers clocked to a Barnes & Noble online site from the Times' online book reviews.

Along with the Shaw report, the Times published on the front page a statement of apology by both Downing and Parks and a statement of principles by which the Times will be operated.

In addition to the usual principles pledging journalistic excellence based on fair and honest reporting, the Times executives stressed that the newspaper would remain free of activities that might compromise its integrity and that if the editorial and commercial interests of the Times conflict, "editorial integrity will always come first."

At Downing's direction, the Times' general counsel also reviewed all of the newspaper's existing contracts and found several potential problems. As a result, Downing ordered two "advertorial" sections destroyed and reprinted to include "Advertising Supplement" labels that had been left off. And the general counsel clarified business agreements that contained ambiguous language about obligations to publish special sections in return for advertising consideration.

Parks named an associate editor to oversee the editorial/advertising relationship and to make sure the wall between the departments remains secure.

He also took the extraordinary step of promoting to executive editor Leo Wolinsky, a highly respected managing editor who had been outspoken in his criticism of the Staples deal. Wolinsky, who took over day-to-day supervision of the newsroom from Parks, had told Shaw: "I think what I've seen in the last year, and maybe a little bit more, is a slippery slope. I've seen a lot of things I would classify as incursions over the line. This was another one. Certainly, in retrospect, it was the worst....But the incursions were incremental."

And, in one of his most damning statements, Wolinsky said that at the Times in Los Angeles, "money is always the first thing we talk about. The readers are always the last thing we talk about."

I cannot say for sure what they talk about in Los Angeles these days because I am based in Washington. But I feel certain the Times has learned a valuable lesson and that the talk in LA, at least among reporters and editors, is more about the readers, not money.

Despite the negative publicity of recent months, you should know the Times remains a great newspaper, one of the best two or three in the country. It was headed that way when I opened its Atlanta Bureau 35 years ago.

I vividly recall attending a 1966 Times editorial awards banquet in Los Angeles where Otis Chandler said he would spend whatever money and manpower it took to make it the best newspaper in the country. And during his reign, the editorial budget went from $3 million to $100 million.

Today there are three major American newspapers that stand in a class by themselves in the amount of resources they devote to covering the news. Except for The New York Times, the L. A. Times devotes more resources to covering the news than any other seven-day-a week newspaper in the United States , and it runs a close second to The New York Times. The L. A. Times has 22 foreign bureaus and 14 domestic bureaus, including a 50-person Washington Bureau. The Washington Post runs well behind the L.A. Times in third place-and the fall-off after The Post is dramatic.

I think the Staples Center controversy has taught the L. A. Times an expensive lesson in journalism ethics. It is a lesson that all news organizations should keep in mind because the competition for the media dollar is only going to intensify.