By Saundra Keyes
Advertiser Editor

Like most newspapers, we take pains to avoid the appearance of conflicts of interest.

I say "appearance" because we rely on our colleagues' ethics to avoid the reality of such conflicts. We're confident, in other words, that no journalists working here would misuse their positions to benefit friends or discredit enemies.

Still, we know it's not enough to tell readers, "Trust us because we trust each other." That's why we have ethics policies.

We don't use The Advertiser's name to leverage favors or resolve personal disputes. We avoid situations in which staff members cover relatives, close friends, or organizations with which they have close personal ties.

For example, reporters who have military spouses or are in the National Guard don't cover military news.

Editors who serve on community boards don't handle stories about those boards' activities.

And members of our staff disclose relationships that might create an appearance of conflict if they wrote, photographed or edited specific stories.

That's trickier than it might sound because we're all involved in this community. Journalists here belong to PTAs, coach soccer, volunteer for community charities and attend services at various places of worship.

And because so many on our staff belong to extended families who are deeply involved in the community, possibilities for the appearance of conflict are endless.

Take the example of our religion and ethics reporter Mary Kaye Ritz, who is married to our graphics editor Stephen Downes. She joked at a recent family dinner that "In Hawai'i, you can't swing a cat without hitting a Downes."

One of the Downeses who would be struck by that metaphorical cat is Mary Kaye's brother-in-law, Patrick Downes, editor of the Hawaii Catholic Herald and spokesman for the Honolulu diocese. Does that mean Mary Kaye shouldn't cover the religion and ethics beat?

In our view, the answer is no. She is a person of integrity, as her brother-in-law is. He is spokesman for only one faith community among the many she covers. And their dealings generally have concerned routine parish matters.

Until now.

Now the question is whether our religion and ethics reporter can cover the most serious scandal ever to affect the Catholic Church — a crisis on which her relative by marriage is often the chief local spokesman.

We don't doubt her ability to cover the story fairly, but we realize some readers or sources might wonder if we're slanting things because of the family relationship.

Working with Mary Kaye as this story evolves, we've decided on this policy: She will continue to report on how the church in general is being affected by this crisis. But we will also have backup reporters who step in whenever she or her editors feel that local issues in the story could create the appearance of conflict.

This comes as welcome news to Patrick Downes, who said he has worked hard to ensure that he never gives The Advertiser inside information "either on purpose or inadvertently" in family settings.

On a less emotionally complicated story, an anonymous caller charged last week that it was a conflict of interest for us to write about the playwriting career of our columnist Lee Cataluna.

That's an issue we debated before running the story — a story Lee didn't initiate and wanted to dodge.

Our debate focused on the question that's always central to decisions on covering ourselves: whether we'd write the story if its subject didn't work here. The answer was a no-brainer.

Any time a Hawai'i playwright has three commissioned works staged in a single year, including a musical with original songs by Keola Beamer, I guarantee you'll read about it in The Honolulu Advertiser.