The Reuters Handbook of Journalism is “the guidance Reuters journalists live by,” according to Dean Wright, global editor, ethics, innovation and news standards for the news agency.

The Reuters Handbook is now available to the public for free online. In the early 1990s, a printed handbook was published and in 2006 a short PDF was put online that gave “some basic guidance to reporters.” But until now, the entire internal handbook has never been available to the public.

In Wright’s announcement on his Reuters blog he explained the decision:

“We’ve decided to make the handbook available to everyone for a number of reasons. Among them:

• Transparency: At a time when trust is an endangered commodity in the financial and media worlds, it’s important that news consumers see the guidelines our journalists follow
• Service: As we’ve seen over the past decade, the barriers to publishing have dropped so that anyone with an idea and a computer can be a publisher. But it’s also become clear that publishers have a varying standard of truth, fairness and style. Our handbook is a good place for budding journalists to begin
• Geography: Reuters serves a global audience and the handbook recognises the cultural and political differences that our journalists face in reporting for the world. This is a handbook not just for English-language journalists in the United Kingdom or the United States, but for wherever English is used

The handbook can be found here.