The decision to run a sensitive story can be tough, but the decision to hold a story can be even tougher.

Last week other Tribune staff members and I made that decision after investigating an alleged public safety incident involving members of the Marquette community at an off-campus residence.

We initially planned to run a story about the incident in last Tuesday's edition of the newspaper but decided on Monday night to hold it so we could verify and obtain more information.

Department of Public Safety reporter Phil Caruso continued to interview people who reportedly saw the incident that occurred. The further we delved into the issue, the more problems we encountered: No official sources with the university would comment on the record about the incident and we could not find sources independent of the people directly involved in the alleged incident to verify our information.

Furthermore, the Milwaukee Police Department did not issue any charges in relation to the incident so it was difficult to determine if anything illegal occurred.

Although we were planning to run the story in Thursday's edition, we decided that running a story based on information supplied by sources whose credibility we were unsure of would have been irresponsible.

Our decision came after having several discussions about the ethical implications of running such a story with the reporter and different editors.

While the Tribune is still investigating this incident, I am confident the steps we took and the subsequent decision we made was the right one because of our discussions.

Having regular ethical discussions in an open environment is one way news organizations can ensure that they exhaust all the options at their disposal, according to Kelly McBride, an ethics group leader at the Poynter Institute, a journalism school in St. Petersburg, Fla., that provides training and resources to the news media.

"The more newsrooms do that, even on the little stories, the better the staff becomes at handling the big crisis — the story that really does have to go in the paper on deadline," McBride said.

In our own discussions, we debated whether we could trust the information being given to us and other ways we could verify the information.

Letting readers know how news organizations make ethical decisions is important, McBride said, because it "trains the reader to consume news that is responsibly gathered."

"If (readers) become accustomed to being privy to newsroom discussions, they will train a weary eye on newsrooms that are secretive — that don't reveal what the internal workings are, and they'll also come to demand it of their news providers," she said.

Editor in chief Andrew Johnson can be reached at (414) 288-7246. The Newsroom Insider runs every other Tuesday.