The executive editor for the Raleigh News & Observer took a novel approach to a White House request for anonymity: When U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner visited recently, his staff initially requested that our interview be on background. We would not have been able to attribute his comments to him. We insisted the conversation be [...]
After buying BusinessWeek, Bloomberg’s editor took issue with the magazine’s lackadaisical attitude toward unnamed sourcing. Editor-in-chief Matthew Winkler issued the following memo to explain what’s wrong with the magazine’s approach: News engenders the most trust and is most actionable when attribution for assertions and quotations is transparent. Bloomberg News, since its inception, uses anonymous sourcing reluctantly [...]
A Web developer has created a clever anonymous source tracker. It looks for various phrases (e.g., “a source close to” or “a person familiar with”) and posts the offending passage. It also tallies the number of unnamed sourcing in various news outlets. The No. 1 offender? BusinessWeek. That outlet has used unnamed sourcing 100 times [...]
Matt J. Duffy wrote his dissertation on the use of unnamed sources. He teaches new media and journalism courses at Zayed University in Abu Dhabi, UAE. Duffy worked as a journalist for many years including stints at The Boston Herald, The Nashua (NH) Telegraph, the (Jackson, MS) Clarion-Ledger and the Marietta (Ga.) Daily Journal. He's served as a reporter, copy editor and news editor.
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