All the names that aren’t fit to print

NEW YORK TIMES standards editor Philip Corbett recently issued a memo to NYT’s reporters and editors concerning the use /abuse of anonymous sources.

The document, posted on Gawker, is interesting reading for media watchers. I can’t speak to what’s going with most other papers, but I read the NYT a fair bit, and now that I think about it, it does seem like they use nameless sources liberally.

Corbett – who maintains one of my favourite news-nerd blogs, After Deadline – says the most common problem involves “the question of what explanation, if any, we offer the reader for why a source wants to be anonymous.”

“Saying that a source insisted on anonymity because he was ‘not authorized’ to speak is usually stating the obvious, and is of little or no help to a reader. Yet we’ve used that formulation nearly 300 times in the past year.”

Writers and editors should be providing readers with more information, says Corbett (seen at left), “a thoughtful sentence or paragraph, describing the pressures or concerns of the people involved in a situation, may give readers greater insight than a terse phrase.”

Some examples he offers: ”out of fear for his safety;” “out of fear of retaliation from X;” “because the company has threatened to fire workers who speak to the press;” “to avoid antagonizing Official X.”

Would be interesting to know how many of those 300 aforementioned uses of nameless source would’ve been thwarted by this requirement.

The crucial concern for the reader, Corbett says, “is how to judge the source’s credibility.”

With this in mind, he suggests reporters and editors try and say as much as possible about how a source knows what it knows (“Was he at the meeting?” / “Have they seen the document?”), and account for any motivation, bias or interest the source might have (“Does she favor/oppose the bill?” / ”Was he fired by the company?”)

He warns NYT staffers about the potential damage overuse of anonymous sources can cause: “While anonymous sources are sometimes crucial to our journalism, every time we rely on anonymity, we put some strain on our credibility with readers.”

Yeah, kind of like cable news shows labeling everything “Breaking News,” or print products slapping “Exclusive” on even the most mundane stories – eventually the audience can grow weary and wary.

Nameless sources should be used to provide “newsworthy information that we can’t report any other way … not for trivial, obvious or tangential information, or for quotes that add little of substance,” Corbett says. “And it should not be used as a mask for personal attacks.”

It really makes you wonder whether NYT’s overuse of nameless sources has been out of necessity, or if –  as Corbett’s memo kind of implies –  it’s simply an issue of lazy reporting.

ryan@roadtostarrdom.com