'Off the record' makes me want to go out of my mind

Few things are as frustrating to a journalist as procuring an interview with a reluctant source, furiously taking notes and then having the subject ask, “You’re not going to print any of that, are you?”

Aaarrrrrrrgggggghhhh!

What do they think? That our note-taking is simply an experiment to see how long it takes for writer’s cramp to set in? That if we didn’t fill our spare time with their off-the-record speculation, we’d have nothing else to do but pound sand?

Such situations put the reporter in a precarious spot. On the one hand, ethics would not be breached by reporting what has been divulged in the scenario I described, but doing so might so badly torque the trousers of the interviewee that the reporter would never get another piece of useful information from that source. Thus, a careful calculus is invoked — is this one piece of information so important that it is worth having this person never speak to me again? In most cases, the answer is “no,” and we bite our tongue, tug our tresses and treat the information as “off the record,” even though it is not.

One would imagine that this sort of thing happens most frequently with people who rarely talk to reporters; to the contrary, public officials, who deal with media almost every day, are some of the worst offenders. Perhaps some are so used to making rules for everyone else, they don’t want to abide by ones they didn’t create.

In just the past week, for example, one longtime municipal official asked to comment off the record — and then further stipulated that anything he told us couldn’t wind up in print, even if someone else told us the same thing. Ridiculous. There are only two reasons we should agree to talk off the record — to allow an authoritative source to confirm or dispute the accuracy of information we’ve already decided to report, or to get accurate information that we could then try to collect from other sources.

We’re not making small talk, folks. Getting something published and getting it right are always the goals.

At least that official got this part right — speaking “off the record” is an agreement entered into by two parties before the speaking begins. You cannot retroactively declare something “off the record,” though that doesn’t stop many sources from trying.

Similarly, many folks love to arrive at our doorstep or e-mail box unannounced and spin us long yarns about this injustice or that, only to tell us we can use the information but we “can’t use my name.” It’s true that some outlets make frequent use of anonymous sources, and it would be difficult to advance some types of reporting — Washington reporting comes to mind — without at least occasional use of anonymous sources.

But readers seem to think we do that sort of thing all the time. To the contrary, when I polled the other editors here, we could think of only three occasions in the past two years in which the use of an anonymous source was approved at either The Beaufort Gazette or The Island Packet. That’s three occasions in thousands of stories.

Our reluctance to use anonymous sources is explained in one fairly recent instance in which we did. The Island Packet’s reporting last year on the disappearance of the Hilton Head Island couple John and Elizabeth Calvert and the apparent suicide of Dennis Gerwing, who authorities said admitted to stealing from them, included initial reports from an unnamed SLED source describing some of Gerwing’s self-inflicted wounds. The source was procured by our McClatchy sister publication, The (Columbia) State, and we decided to cite it in our stories, as well. But when autopsy reports were made public a short time later, it turned out at least some of the details provided were inaccurate — a fact Sheriff P.J. Tanner alluded to in a press conference and that we had no choice but to report in a later story.

The upshot is that anonymity makes it difficult — virtually impossible, actually — for the reader to adjudge the veracity of our reporting. There are any number of possible motivations to speak to the media — either to lie or to tell the truth. Identifying sources is the first step toward ascertaining those motives and gauging the truthfulness of information. Withholding identity means the reader must put an awful lot of trust in the authenticity and accuracy of the reporting. If that source gives you a bum steer, it erodes reader confidence, which is the coin of this realm.

That’s why we’ll withhold the identity of a source only when certain conditions are met: The information the source provides is integral to the story, the information cannot be obtained any other way and/or identifying the source would jeopardize his or her health, life or (unjustly) career. (In some instances, it might also be illegal for us to name a source.)

Here are some other general guidelines as they apply to sourcing of stories:

Off the record: Comments or information are off the record only if the newspaper agrees that they are. If such an agreement is reached, the newspaper won’t reveal the identity of that source — either directly or indirectly — in print or in conversation with other sources and will not publish the information at all unless it can be independently verified. We discourage reporters from allowing off-the-record conversations unless they think it is the only way to break a log jam and advance a story.

On background: This is basically another way of saying “off the record,” although the term tends to be applied mostly to briefings given by high-level government or business authorities.

Unattributable: This is information that the source agrees can be reported but not attributed to them. We generally will always seek a way to get the same information from someone who will talk to us on the record and for attribution. If we cannot, we’ll treat this as an anonymous source and decide if the need to report this information supersedes the risk doing so poses to our credibility. If an anonymous source is cited in a story, the information provided likely would be attributed to “a source close to the case” or a “high ranking town official,” something of that nature, so that the reader has some basis on which to judge its reliability. Again, though, this is something we almost never do.

Moreover, reporters should be suspect of information provided by people who won’t allow their name to be attached to it. It doesn’t mean such sources are lying or have an ax to grind, but it does mean a reporter’s readers cannot preclude that possibility. And since even named sources get things wrong sometimes, the need for non-conventional sourcing must be weighed against the damage done if the information you print turns out to be unreliable.

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