Here’s one of the presentations I’ll be making at the AEJMC conference in St. Louis next week. I may have to shorten it a tad because I’m only supposed to speak for 10 minutes. The research represents about a third of my doctoral dissertation, and the paper will be published in Newspaper Research Journal later [...]

You can never be sure they’re telling the truth, writes Jack Schafer in Slate. Some interesting points about the similarities to the infamous FBI informant and the age-old journalism technique: That collaborations between sources and journalists rarely result in murder is something for which we can all be grateful. But the parallels are too many [...]

Great post about a Afghanistan/Pakistan article in the New York Times totally attributed to unnamed sources. The author counts 24 separate anonymous sources to which the report is attributed: The source confusion is so rampant that the article approaches unreadability due to the difficulty of tracking who is who. For example, in the sentence “The [...]

This report from FoxSports.com is bad journalism: Auburn quarterback Cameron Newton had three different instances of academic cheating while attending the University of Florida and faced potential expulsion from the university, according to a source. Newton, considered the front-runner for the Heisman Trophy, attended Florida in 2007 and 2008 before transferring to Blinn College, a [...]

You guessed it. One, unverified anonymous source. The Press Trust of India published this report a few days ago that claimed President Obama’s trip to India would cost $200 million a day. “The huge amount of around $200 million would be spent on security, stay and other aspects of the Presidential visit,” a top official [...]

Here’s a link to Arthur Brisbane’s column in which he grants a former military officer anonymity to question the ethics of the Wikileaks dump. Brisbane has been on the job for about a month and has yet to write a column bemoaning the use of unnamed sources at his newspaper. Former public editors Daniel Okrent, [...]

Interesting article about the move to limit anonymous comments from newspaper websites: The more I researched the history of American news media, the more I realized that our profession’s disdain for anonymous commentary is built upon a myth. Anonymity isn’t anathema to American democracy; in fact, anonymous speech is exactly what the framers of the [...]

Phil Corbett, the standards editor for the New York Times, issued a memo to the staff this week emphasizing the rules surrounding anonymous sourcing at the paper. The memo diverged little from previous policies. He did take reporters to task for “boilerplate” explanations explaining anonymity. He recommends offering more robust explanations, such as: – “out [...]

The New York Times provides an extremely detailed account of the acrimony between BP and U.S. officials as they battled to plug the Gulf oil spill. The article offers specific information about what happened including embarrassing confrontations between the individuals involved. The report is notable for the lack of one thing — unnamed sources. All [...]

Great column from the Washington Post ombudsman pointing out that the newspaper doesn’t follow its own rule regarding unnamed sourcing: For decades, ombudsmen have complained about The Post’s unwillingness to follow its own lofty standards on anonymous sources. Readers, who care about the quality of The Post’s journalism, persistently object to anonymity they see as [...]