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Malia always enchants audiences with the raw emotion in her performances.

Shawna already leaving to catch the plane for her week-long cruise to Puerto Vallarta.

More than fifty reviews of the new video game console.

For breakfast, this restaurant serves eggs with biscuits and gravy.

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Our ice hockey team mascot, a grizzly bear.

Dalton and Wendy both handle themselves well under pressure.

After the trial, new evidence emerged about the case.

Ted going to the movies later this evening.

Mrs. Vincent carefully buttoned up her coat.

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Marie fulfilling her dream of hiking to the top of Mount St. Helens.

In August 2012, the Curiosity rover landed on Mars.

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In Japan, the Hanshin Expressway actually runs through a building!

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News literacy & alternative facts: how to be a responsible information consumer, tools for verification, things to consider, additional tips, evaluating a report, created by:.

• Finding Reliable Information
• Further Resources
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Click on the black arrow to open the chat in a new window. If we're not online, please email us at [email protected]. Please allow 1-2 business days for a response.

Looking for some basic tools to help you verify, cross-check, and compare content you see online to avoid spreading fake news?   Here are a few basic open access resources to get you started:

Fact Checkers

• Factcheck.org FactCheck.org fact-checks claims made by presidents, members of Congress, presidential candidates, and other members of the political arena by reviewing TV ads, debates, speeches, interviews, and news releases.
• PolitiFact: Fact-checking US politics Politifact fact-checks claims by politicians at the federal, state, and local level, as well as political parties, PACs, and advocacy groups and ates the accuracy of these claims on its Truth-O-Meter.
• Snopes Snopes.com was originally founded to uncover rumors that had begun cropping up in chain emails and message boards and is now highly regarded for its fact-checking.
• Verification Handbook: An ultimate guideline on digital age sourcing Handbook is a step by step guide for verifying digital content initially created for reporters and emergency responders.

Verify Webpage History

• Internet Wayback Machine Web archive that captures websites over time and can be used to verify content history and edits.

Check Author's Credentials

• LinkedIn A professional networking website where you can look up the authors of articles and books to see if they're credible.

Verify Images

Found an image you think may have been manipulated or photo-shopped? Use these tools to check for any digital changes:

• FotoForensics Identify parts of an image that may have been modified or photoshopped.
• Google Reverse Image Search Upload or use a URL image to check the content history or to see similar images on the web.
• Google Street View Identifying the location of a suspicious photo or video is a crucial part of the verification process.
• TinEye Reverse Image Search Upload or enter an image URL to the search bar and see a list of related sites. Has plug-ins for your browser.
• Wikimapia Crowd-sourced version of Google Maps, featuring additional information.

Source: William H. Hannon Library. (2017). Tools for verifying. http://libguides.lmu.edu/c.php?g=595781&p=4121899

Source: IFLA. (2017). How to spot fake news [Online image]. http://blogs.ifla.org/lpa/2017/01/27/alternative-facts-and-fake-news-verifiability-in-the-information-society/

Source: WNYC. (2013). Breaking news consumer's handbook: Fake news edition [Online image]. http://www.wnyc.org/story/breaking-news-consumers-handbook-pdf/

Online tools can be helpful, but nothing is more important than developing your own ability to think critically about news and information sources.  Still unsure of what questions you should ask when evaluating a news report?  The Indiana University East Campus Library has provided an excellent example of how to evaluate a news claim from an online source.  In the example below, see how the IUE Campus Library evaluated a claim that the earth is hollow.  

Source: Indiana University East Campus Library. (2017). Let's check a claim. http://iue.libguides.com/fakenews/claim

Alicia Vaandering, 2/2017

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Expert Commentary

How to gauge the quality of a research study: 13 questions journalists should ask

Asking these questions can help journalists gauge the quality of a research study or report and avoid relying on flawed findings.

Republish this article

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License .

by Denise-Marie Ordway, The Journalist's Resource March 21, 2017

This <a target="_blank" href="https://journalistsresource.org/media/good-research-bad-quality-journalism-tips/">article</a> first appeared on <a target="_blank" href="https://journalistsresource.org">The Journalist's Resource</a> and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.<img src="https://journalistsresource.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/cropped-jr-favicon-150x150.png" style="width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;">

Academic research is one of journalists’ best tools for covering public policy issues. It’s also a tool that takes skill to use.

Experienced journalists use research to ground their work and fact-check claims made by politicians, policymakers and others. Many journalists, however, are not trained in research methods and statistical analysis. Some have difficulty differentiating between a quality study and a questionable one.

Journalist’s Resource has put together a list of questions reporters should ask when selecting studies to guide their coverage. While there is no way to guarantee the quality of a study, these questions can help journalists avoid biased or otherwise flawed research.

It’s important to note that many of these questions apply primarily to quantitative research, or research in social sciences and natural sciences that involves the analysis of data.

• Is this research peer reviewed? A study published in a peer-reviewed journal typically undergoes a detailed critique by a small number of qualified scholars. The peer-review process, while imperfect, is designed for quality control.
• Is it published in a top-tier academic journal? Top journals are more likely to feature high-quality research. They are more selective about the research they accept for publication. Also, their peer-review process tends to be more rigorous. A measure for gauging a journal’s ranking is its Impact Factor, which can be found in the Journal Citation Reports database . Impact Factor scores range from zero to over 100.
• Do other scholars trust this work? One indicator of whether other scholars consider a study to be credible is the number of times they cite it in their own research. It can take years, however, for a study to generate a high citation count. You can use Google Scholar , a free search engine, or  Web of Science , a subscription-based service, to find citation counts. Journalists also can ask faculty in the field their opinions.
• Who funded the research? It’s important to know who sponsored the research and what role, if any, a sponsor played in the design of the study and its implementation or in decisions about how findings would be presented to the public. Authors of studies published in academic journals are required to disclose funding sources. Studies funded by organizations such as the National Science Foundation tend to be trustworthy because the funding process itself is subject to an exhaustive peer-review process.
• What are the authors’ credentials? Knowing where the authors work and how often they have been published can help you assess their expertise in a field of study.
• How old is the study? In certain fields — for example, chemistry or public opinion — a study that is several years old may no longer be reliable.
• Do the authors have a conflict of interest? Be leery of research conducted by individuals or organizations that stand to gain from the findings.
• What’s the sample size? For studies based on samples, larger samples generally yield more accurate results than smaller samples.
• Does the study rely on survey results? Survey results can be biased if respondents were not chosen by random selection. Beware of any survey that relies on respondents who self-select (for example, many internet-based surveys).
• Can you follow the methodology? Scholars should explain how they approached their research questions, where they got their data and how they used it. They also should clearly define key concepts and describe the statistical methods used in their analyses. This level of detail is necessary to allow other people to check and replicate their work. Replicability is critical.
• Is statistical data presented? Authors should present details about the data they are examining and the numerical results of their analyses. This allows others to review their calculations. In some fields, authors make their data sets publicly available.
• Are the study’s findings supported by the data? Good researchers are very cautious in describing their conclusions – because they want to convey exactly what they learned. Sometimes, however, researchers might exaggerate or minimize their findings or there will be a discrepancy between what an author claims to have found and what the data suggests.
• Is it a meta-study?  Among the most reliable studies are meta-studies, also referred to as meta-analyses. Their conclusions are based on an analysis of multiple studies done on a particular topic.

Journalist’s Resource would like to thank these scholars for their help in creating this tip sheet: Adam J. Berinsky, professor of political science at MIT; Marybeth Gasman, professor of higher education at the University of Pennsylvania; Morgan L. W. Hazelton, assistant professor of political science at Saint Louis University; Thomas E. Patterson, professor of government and the press at Harvard University; Eric A. Stewart, professor of criminology at Florida State University.

About The Author

Denise-Marie Ordway

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Confidential sources

• What does an “anonymous source” mean?
• On what basis should we grant confidentiality to a source?
• What understandings should you have when granting confidentiality?
• What if a spokesperson doesn’t want to be identified?

Should you take part in background briefings?

• How can you protect confidentiality if you or the source might be subject to electronic surveillance?

Use of confidential sources is an area where many news organizations’ policies and practices don’t necessarily match up. Many news organizations have policies that say they rarely use confidential sources, but in practice they frequently use them. Whether you favor using confidential sources heavily because of the tips and information people will provide if you don’t name them, or whether you favor seldom or never using confidential sources, because you don’t consider them credible, top editors in any news organization should discuss their standards with their staffs and try to achieve consistency in how and why you grant confidentiality.

Terminology

Often among journalists and especially among our critics, the term for sources we don’t name is “anonymous sources,” or we explain in a story that the source requested “anonymity.” But this term can be misleading or even inaccurate in ways that undercut the news organization’s credibility. The truth is that few, if any, news stories ever actually use any information from truly anonymous sources: people whose identities are unknown to the journalists or the news organization.

Truly anonymous sources would be people who call us on the telephone with tips and refuse to give their names, anonymous commenters on our websites or someone contacting us through email or social media (or even in person) who refuse to identify themselves to us. Journalists get valuable tips in these ways but shouldn’t publish anything based on these sources. If you publish a story at all, you should use the tip as a starting point and find sources you trust — whether they will go on the record or not — on which to base a story.

This may appear a matter of semantics, but anything involving unnamed sources affects the credibility of your stories. And every tiny step you can take to assure the reader or viewer that you have tried to use reliable sources is important. Using terms such as “confidential” sources probably doesn’t build much confidence, but the word “anonymous” or “anonymity” can hurt your credibility, and isn’t accurate from your standpoint. So consider avoiding those terms.

Journalists using unnamed sources usually know the sources well. If they are not sources you have used before, you should question them extensively about how they know what they are telling you and why they can’t go on the record. You might research their credentials to judge their veracity. Because of your pledge of confidentiality, you generally can’t vet sources by asking others about their credibility, but sometimes a confidential source can put you in touch with a trusted contact of yours who can vouch for her credibility. Sometimes a source you trust leads you to a good source that insists on remaining confidential.

Steve Buttry discussed this issue at greater length in his blog post “You didn’t hear this from me…”

When to grant confidentiality

Here are other factors to consider when determining whether to grant confidentiality and how to handle such requests:

What is the source’s reason for wanting not to be identified?

Paul Farhi of the Washington Post wrote a story in 2013 about the weak explanations news reports give of sources’ reasons for not being identified.

Before a journalist grants confidentiality, you should have a detailed discussion of the source’s reasons for wanting to avoid accountability, which is what happens when you don’t name sources. Tell the source that your stories are more credible and your sources more accountable when you use their names and gain a thorough understanding of the source’s motivation.

Sometimes this discussion reveals that the source isn’t confident enough in what he is saying to stand behind it. You need to know that. Maybe the source isn’t sharing first-hand information. In that case, you need to ask the source to help you get to the original source. You can build credibility with the source by saying that you don’t use second-hand sources, and ask this person’s help in identifying and/or reaching the original source.

If the source’s reason for wanting anonymity sounds weak, push back on the source and see whether you can talk her into going on the record. Be willing to walk away from a source whose reason is so poor that you doubt the source’s credibility.

Is the information available elsewhere?

Ask the source who else might have the information or whether documentation exists. If the source can give you the documentation, you never have to name the source or use an unnamed source, just cite the documents.

If someone else has the information, try that person to see if she will speak for the record.

If a person is the only source for a piece of information, you might have a stronger reason to grant confidentiality.

You may wish to write, when quoting unnamed sources, that the person “insisted” on not being named. Saying that, rather than “requested not to be named,” emphasizes that you do not grant anonymity easily. It makes clear that if you had not granted confidentiality, you would not have the information.

What information is the source providing?

The more important the information is, the more willing a journalist will normally be to make a deal. If the information doesn’t seem very important, consider taking one of two approaches:

Tell the source you don’t want to talk unless it’s on the record. Tell the source you’d like to hear the information for background purposes but you’re not likely to use it without a name. It might help you understand the issue better or lead you to another source.

You can’t always get a good idea before granting confidentiality about what the information is. Sometimes you can opt for the first option during the interview, saying that if this is as good as it gets, you don’t want to continue talking off the record. It’s more likely in this case that you will end up going to the second option, thanking the source but saying you’re not likely to use this information unless you can attribute it by name.

Is the source dishing opinion?

Information from unnamed sources has some value if they are telling the truth. If a source gives you information, you can seek documentation or verification from other sources. You can describe how the source knows the information, giving credibility to the information.

But the value of an opinion is entirely dependent on the person holding the opinion. A person who criticizes others and won’t stand behind the opinions with his name is a coward, and journalists shouldn’t honor those opinions by publishing them.

Steve Buttry addressed this issue at greater length in a 2005 blog post “Unnamed sources should have unpublished opinions.”

Is the source eager or reluctant?

You should be more willing to grant confidentiality to a source you approach but is reluctant to talk than to a source who approaches you with information he hopes you’ll publish.

When you initiate the conversation, you are trying to persuade the source to help you with your story. Confidentiality is a technique you can use to start the conversation. You may already understand why the source is reluctant to be identified. You may be able to talk the person into going on the record about some or all of the interview if you use confidentiality to start the conversation and then get time to build some trust.

But when a source approaches you with a tip and wants to stay unnamed, it may be that you’re being played. In many cases, the source who approaches you isn’t the real source, but a pawn. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t grant confidentiality. The source might give you important information that you can verify elsewhere. One approach when dealing with an eager source who initiates a conversation is to grant confidentiality for the conversation but make clear that you may not publish the information unless the person will go on the record or unless you can verify it independently. Push back, and ask the person why she won’t be identified if she is so eager to get this information published.

Steve Buttry wrote more about these issues in a 2013 post “Use confidential sources to get on-the-record interviews” and in a 2010 post “Power and eagerness should guide reporters’ confidentiality decisions.”

Is the source powerful or vulnerable?

Journalists should be more willing to grant confidentiality to a vulnerable source than a powerful one. But keep in mind that power and vulnerability are both relative.

Mark Felt was a powerful man as associate director of the FBI. But he also was vulnerable, as Bob Woodward‘s famed “Deep Throat” source in the Watergate stories , when he was confirming information about wrongdoing that involved the White House. Also, he was reluctant rather than eager.

But other officials abuse their power by leaking classified information for political purposes.

Journalists have been lenient with many powerful people who seek to avoid accountability by doing their sniping from behind journalists. You may be better off missing a few stories than getting into this kind of abusive relationship. Keep in mind that some of the stories you get from these sources may be false or misleading; the sources are leaking partial or even false information because they aren’t accountable.

Steve Buttry discussed this issue in a 2010 post “Power and eagerness should guide reporters’ confidentiality decisions.”

Are the source and information worth going to jail for?

If good laws to protect confidential sources do not exist in your region, you need to consider whether law enforcement or someone in a civil court case will try to force you to reveal your source. Then you need to decide whether this story, the information the source is providing and the source himself is worth going to jail for.

Keep in mind that this is a calculation you need to make before granting confidentiality, not just before you publish. Reporters have been ordered by courts to reveal sources they did not even cite in stories.

It’s also worth noting that not every story based on confidential sources presents the threat of going to jail. Many stories present no risk at all (e.g. your local team is going to hire a new coach, and you have the news from unnamed sources before the official announcement).

How well can you protect the source?

A good rule of journalism and life is that you shouldn’t make promises you can’t keep. So, if you’re promising confidentiality to a source, especially one who might draw the attention of law enforcement or intelligence agencies, consider whether you can keep that promise.

If a law enforcement agency seizes your phone records, will they lead directly to your source? If an intelligence agency eavesdrops on your phone calls or snoops in your emails, will that lead to the source? What if the source’s employer checks the records for her company cell phone or checks her emails on her company account?

A journalist who promises confidentiality in a situation that could attract scrutiny by law enforcement, intelligence agencies or employers should learn about secrecy technology and then take simple steps to protect relationships with your sources. Meet in person when you can, in places where you can have some privacy. Discuss how to communicate, if at all, electronically. The situation will determine which options are best for you:

• Is it best (and sufficient) for either or both of you to communicate using personal (rather than work) computers and/or phones?
• Do you need to set up special email and/or social media accounts for communicating?
• Do you need to use a “burner” cell phone? (Don’t be too sure that it will protect your source.)
• Do you need to use encryption in any emails or documents you share?
• Is there a danger, in your country, that using encryption or other secure technologies could raise officials’ suspicions and lead to increased monitoring of your activities? Alternatively, might a court rule that if you use encryption for some messages, you have no expectation of privacy for those you don’t encrypt?

Jeremy Barr wrote a helpful piece for Poynter, “How journalists can encrypt their email.” However, technologies are constantly changing, so make sure you are using the latest advice available.

Do you trust the source?

Relations between journalists and sources require trust. The source has to trust the journalist to understand the story and report it accurately and fairly. The journalist has to trust the source to tell the truth.

Trust in a source depends on three things:

Your assessment of the source’s personal trustworthiness.

Your inquiry about how the source knows what he claims to know. An honest source can still be mistaken or have a faulty memory. “How do you know that?” and “How else do you know that?” are among the most important questions in journalism, and they are essential to ask when dealing with confidential sources.

Your ability to verify what the source tells you. You don’t have to make your demands for documentation and other sources a challenge to the source’s veracity. Everything you can verify through other sources is something you don’t have to pin on this source (or this source alone) and something that is harder to track back to the source.

Sometimes you can’t verify all the facts a source tells you. But if you verify some of the facts, you gain confidence in the source’s honesty and accuracy.

Will the information come out soon anyhow?

A lot of stories based on unnamed sources are stories that will become public in a day (or pretty soon) anyway.

You’re probably going to publish that story in most circumstances, unless you take a hard-line position against ever using unnamed sources. But you should consider whether a short-lived scoop is worth making sources and readers think you’re promiscuous about granting anonymity.

Nail down as much of the story as possible with sources that can be named. For example, can you verify that a university donor’s plane has flown to the city where the new coach lives? Or that the new coach has checked into a local hotel? Can you reach players or assistant coaches on the coach’s old team (or check their social media accounts) to see if they’ve been told? They won’t be as likely to honor a request to keep the secret until the announcement. You might be able to get someone else on the record.

Be specific about the terms of your agreement

When you discuss confidentiality, you need to be specific about the terms of your agreement. Be sure that the source understands you’re going to seek documentation and/or other on-the-record sources for the information.

Discuss whether you can attribute the information in some way to this source or whether this is just a tip.

If you can attribute, discuss how you will refer to the source, and avoid agreeing to a description that would be inaccurate or misleading.

An identification that’s overly broad (an “administration source”) is better than one that’s misleading. Particularly if the person doesn’t agree to a more specific or helpful description of who he is (“a close aide to the vice president”), negotiate what you can say about how the person knows (“according to a person who has read the report”).

When granting confidentiality for intimate personal stories, such as interviews with victims of domestic violence or sexual abuse, you might persuade a source to identify herself by her middle name (and to say in the story that you are using the middle name). Maybe a person will agree to use a childhood nickname or a birth name she no longer uses.

Some organizations will use a false name for a source (stating in the story, “not her real name”). Other news outlets take the position that they will carry nothing that is false, for any reason.

Discuss what will happen if the source is lying. Would you reveal a source who lies to you? (Keep in mind that sometimes a source has misinformation; not every bad tip you get is a lie.)

Discuss what will happen if you’re subpoenaed. Would you go to jail for the source? Would the source come forward in that circumstance? (Don’t expect this if the source is breaking the law by giving you this information.)

Powerful people sometimes talk with journalists in background briefings where they discuss issues on condition that they won’t be identified. Some journalists participate, but others have decided that the briefings don’t provide enough value to risk their credibility.

The Associated Press’ Statement of News Values and Principles (http://www.ap.org/company/News-Values) says, “Reporters should object vigorously when a source wants to brief a group of reporters on background and try to persuade the source to put the briefing on the record.”

You might consider going a step further in most circumstances and boycotting the briefing unless you know the information is unusually valuable. You can spend your time getting exclusive on-the-record stories rather than joining other media in an exercise that hurts everyone’s credibility.

What if a spokesperson wants confidentiality?

Journalists should be especially reluctant to quote a spokesperson without using her name. If she’s speaking for an official, organization or company, she should be on the record.

A rare exception might be when a spokesperson is giving you information that doesn’t relate directly to the official or organization she represents. You might also have valid reasons to grant confidentiality for a spokesperson who is revealing negative information about the person or organization he represents.

Some reporters deal with spokespeople whose organizations require that they speak only as a “spokesperson.” In these situations, keep in mind that mouthpiece statements often aren’t that important anyway. You might bolster your credibility by saying that a spokesperson wouldn’t give his name and the reasons didn’t meet your organization’s standards for confidentiality. Do that a few times, and the organizations you deal with may decide that they want to get their viewpoints out. You may also write simply that “the company said.”

Steve Buttry blogged about this in a 2012 post “Spokespeople should be named; set the bar high for confidentiality.”

After you talk, try again to get the source on the record.

At the end of an interview, ask sources again about going on the record for some or all of what they’ve said (Steve Buttry describes Eric Nalder’s “ratcheting” technique in his 2005 post “You can quote me on that.”

The main author of this module is Steve Buttry of Louisiana State University. It includes material from Buttry’s blog post on confidential sources .

See also the section in this project on “Sources: Reliability and Attribution.”

ETHICS IN THE NEWS

Ethical ground rules for handling sources, aidan white.

Good journalism is only ever as good as our sources of information. Most of those sources are personal, many are official, and some will be anonymous whistle-blowers. Together they provide reporters with the lifeblood of their trade – reliable, accurate and truthful information.

Journalists need to be as transparent as possible in their relations with sources. The news media have great power and people can be flattered when they are approached by reporters without understanding fully the risks to themselves and to others when they come into the public eye. This is particularly true of people caught up in humanitarian disasters, war or other traumatic events.

Journalists have to assess the vulnerability of sources as well as their value as providers of information. They have to explain the process of their journalism and why they are covering the story.

They should not, except in the most extraordinary circumstances, use subterfuge or deception in their dealings with sources.

Some questions that the ethical journalist will ask in establishing good relations with a source include:

• Have I clarified with my source the basis of our relations and have I been fully transparent about my intentions?
• Have I taken care to protect the source – for instance if they are a young person or someone in vulnerable circumstances – to ensure they are aware of the potential consequences of publication of the information they give?
• Am I confident the source fully understands the conditions of our interview and what I mean by off-the-record, on background, not-for attribution, or other labels?
• If a source asks for conditions before agreeing to an interview, what are my limits?
• Would I pay for a source’s expenses related to an interview? What legitimate costs could be paid?
• Would I agree to provide legal representation?

Of paramount importance is the need for journalists to reassure sources that their identity will be protected. But often this is easier said than done.

Protection of sources is well recognised in international law as a key principle underpinning press freedom. It has been specifically recognised by the United Nations and the Council of Europe.

Journalists and news media should establish guidelines and internal rules that help protect sources. Reporters may benefit from a clause in their contracts or agreements that clearly states their duties and obligations. National Public Radio in the United States has a clause in its guidelines that spells it out:

“Journalists must not turn over any notes, audio or working materials from their stories or productions, nor provide information they have observed in the course of their production activities to government officials or parties involved in or considering litigation. If such materials or information are requested in the context of any governmental, administrative or other legal processes this must be reported to the company.”

When faced with the decision to tell or not to tell in these circumstances, journalists must consider the impact of their actions and ask themselves some sharp questions:

• Who will benefit if this source is revealed?
• Who will suffer and who will lose?
• Will a criminal or powerful figure guilty of malpractice escape justice?
• Is this a case where the police and other investigating authorities are genuinely unable to provide the required information?
• Will the work of other journalists and the mission of media be compromised by revealing information?
• Will the public interest be served or not be served by cooperation?

In the end, journalists have to make their own decisions, based upon conscience and their own responsibility, but revealing a source of information is never to be taken lightly.

Don’t Get too Close to the Source

Sometimes journalists make the mistake of getting too close to their source. They sometimes create cosy relations that are ambiguous and can easily undermine the ethical base of their work. Powerful sources have their own agenda and accepting what they say without question crosses an ethical line and compromises newsroom independence.

The New York Times and other major news media in the United States, for instance, were heavily criticised before the invasion of Iraq in 2003 for relying too heavily on anonymous sources of information inside the government. Media coverage was highly deferential despite abundant evidence of the government’s flagrant misuse of intelligence information.

A chief offender was New York Times reporter Judith Miller, who produced stories in 2001 and 2002 about the government of Saddam Hussein in Iraq based on false information supplied by unnamed sources. She appeared to accept without question dubious information about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq from anonymous sources, including some at the Bush White House prior to the United States invasion in 2003.

Source Review of Content

The issue of who controls the story – the source or the reporter – comes up whenever copy approval is demanded, whether by high-profile and powerful figures or by sources themselves. It was a row at the heart of the falling out between WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and some major media over the handling of leaked official documents.

In many countries leading politicians and their spin doctors simply refuse exclusive interviews unless they can sign off on the final article. In Germany, it is accepted practice, even within the elite press, for journalists to submit the quotes they plan to use to politicians and other public figures, although most journalists claim they go along with this only for fact-checking and points of accuracy.

Given these conditions, journalists should ask themselves:

• Are there potential benefits to the accuracy of the story in allowing a source to review portions or all of it in advance of publication? In particular, are there technical aspects that might be clarified if incorrect?
• Are there potential pitfalls in doing so? Might the source respond in a manner harmful to the story or to others involved?
• If the source wants to change something in the story, such as a quote, how will I respond?

Anonymous Sources

Anonymity is a right that should be enjoyed by those who need it and should never be granted routinely to anyone who asks for it. People who may lose their job for whistleblowing; or young children; or women who are the victims of violence and abuse and others who are vulnerable and at risk from exposure are obviously entitled to it, but anonymity is not a privilege to be enjoyed by people who are self-seeking and who benefit by personal gain through keeping their identity secret.

Journalists should ask themselves:

• What is the likely motivation for demanding anonymity? Does that motivation potentially compromise me and my publication?
• Are there other methods I can employ to increase credibility while granting anonymity?
• Is there no other way to get and publish this information? Have I exhausted all other methods and potential sources?
• Do I or my colleagues have history with this source that speaks to his/her credibility?
• Have I maximised the level of identification that can be published without revealing the source’s personal identity?

Social Media and User-Generated Content

In today’s digital environment, rumour and speculation circulate freely and knowing what is real and how to verify news and information is essential. Reporters must be alert to the danger of falling for bad information from online sources whether it is user-generated content or social media. Digital-age sourcing is a major challenge, particularly in emergency coverage where rumour and falsehood can quickly add to the tension and uncertainty surrounding traumatic events.

Some questions a reporter might ask, in the case of social media, include:

• Have I corroborated the origin including location, date and time of images and content that I am using from social media?
• Have I confirmed that this material is the original piece of content?
• Have I verified the social media profiles of accounts I am using to avoid use of fake information?
• Is the account holder known to me and has it been a reliable source in the past?
• Have I asked direct questions of the content provider to verify the provenance of the information?
• Are any websites linked from the content?
• Have we looked for and found the same or similar posts/content elsewhere online?
• Have I obtained permission from the author or originator to use the material whether pictures, videos or audio content?
• Have I collaborated with others to verify and confirm the authenticity of content?

In the case of user-generated content:

• What do I know about the actual origin of this content? Can I verify the source?
• Are there copyright or legal issues around using the content?
• Have I ensured that all the information can be used and that the conditions for use are clear, for instance through Creative Commons Licence?
• Am I confident that there have been no reality-offering alterations (eg Photoshop) used?

In the case of sourcing breaking news:

• Before I report or retweet a development reported elsewhere, how confident am I in its accuracy?
• Would I potentially cause harm if I reported something before it is established at 100% certainty? Is there potential harm in not reporting it?
• Have I been careful to question first-hand accounts that can be inaccurate and manipulative, emotional or shaped by faulty memory and limited perspective?
• Have I triangulated the information with other credible sources?
• Have I acknowledged that the material I am using can be copied, distributed, and displayed, including derivative works based on it, and have I given credit to the original author and source?

Find out More: Craig Silverman, Editor of Regret the Error at the Poynter Institute, and Media Editor at BuzzFeed, has collaborated with the European Journalism Centre to produce a useful Verification Handbook.

You can read this article in Spanish thanks to FNPI: Preguntas que todo periodista debe hacerse sobre sus fuentes

When Human Rights Trump Protection of Sources

Over the years there have been hundreds of cases when courts and public authorities ordered journalists to hand over material or information that would reveal a source of information. In most cases the ethical reporter will instinctively demur. some will go to jail rather than betray a confidence.

Sometimes there are hard choices to be made. War correspondent Jonathan Randal of the Washington Post , for instance, famously refused to answer a subpoena in 2002 ordering him to appear before the International Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia which was prosecuting war crimes. Randal fought the subpoena with the backing of his paper and won. This action, which was supported by press freedom groups around the world, established some limited legal protection for war correspondents against being forced to give testimony.

But when conscience calls others have been willing to cooperate. Another journalist who reported on the Bosnian war in the 1990s, Ed Vulliamy of the Guardian , was happy to testify before the tribunal. His evidence helped convict and send to jail some of those responsible for war crimes. He argued that bringing to justice war criminals is a cause in which journalists, like other citizens, have a duty to join.

Main image: Journalist by Esther Vargas (Flickr – CC BY-SA 2.0)

BROWSE THE REPORT

Ethics in the News: Challenges for Journalism in the Post-Truth Era | 18th December 2016

Ethics in the News: Challenges for journalism in the post-truth era

Trumped: How US Media Played the Wrong Hand on Right-Wing Success

Media Lies and Brexit: A Double Hammer-Blow to Europe and Ethical Journalism

Fake News: Facebook and Matters of Fact in the Post-Truth Era

Tips for Exposing Fake News

Refugee Images - Ethics in the Picture

The Perfect Source: Edward Snowden, a Role Model for Whistleblowers and Journalists Everywhere

Panama Papers

Hate Speech: A Dilemma for Journalists the World Over

Ethics in the News: Challenges for Journalism in the Post-Truth Era | 4th January 2017

Hate Speech: India v Pakistan

Hate Speech: Africa

Hate Speech: Hong Kong

"Honour Killing"

Turkey: After an Attempted Coup the Journalists’ Nightmare

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If you share our mission, please consider donating to the Ethical Journalism Network. Your financial contribution will help the EJN to support journalists around the world who are striving to uphold ethical practices in order to build public trust in good journalism.

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The News Literacy Project

Evaluating unnamed sources in news reports

Published on September 12, 2018 Updates

John Silva, NBCT

Senior Director of Education and Training

On Sept. 5, the editors of The New York Times’ opinion page took what they called “the rare step of publishing an anonymous Op-Ed essay.”  The action raises an important issue in journalism and an opportunity to teach students about evaluating unnamed sources in the news.

By “unnamed sources,” I am referring to the people who provide information published in news reports, editorials and other opinion pieces but whose names are not given. (It’s important to remember that the source’s identity is unknown to us — the readers, viewers and listeners — but is known by the journalist and, usually, at least one editor at the news organization.)

Being a critical consumer of news includes understanding and evaluating different types of sources — such as official sources, eyewitness sources, raw video and documents — to determine whether a news article is credible. Evaluating the words of individuals who are not named requires a closer look at both the journalist and the news organization.

Most news articles routinely attribute key facts to a source who is identified by name and, often, by title — information telling us why the source is in a position to know about and comment on the topic. When the source is unnamed, news consumers should consider two key elements: why the source desires anonymity, and what is behind the source’s decision to share this information.

Here is how The Associated Press, a global news agency that produces more than 2,000 news stories per day, defines the terms used in granting anonymity (parenthetical information in the definitions is not from AP). Other news organizations may have their own definitions of these terms. Both the reporter and the source must agree to these ground rules before an interview.

• On the record: The information can be used with no caveats, quoting the source by name.
• Off the record:  The information cannot be used for publication. (But the reporter can use this knowledge to get the information verified elsewhere.)
• On background: The information can be published but only under conditions negotiated with the source. Generally, the sources do not want their names published but will agree to a description of their position. (Other news outlets may refer to this as “not for attribution”; some may even distinguish between “not for attribution” and “on background.”)
• On deep background: The information can be used but without attribution. The source does not want to be identified in any way, even on condition of anonymity.

Why do journalists use unnamed sources, especially since it might endanger the trust the public has in their work? After all, the public should know whether these sources are in a position to be fully informed on the matter or are offering a skewed version that serves their purposes, not ours.

The news organization’s obligation

For starters: Good news organizations do not publish information from unnamed sources without consideration and thorough vetting. As reporter Jason Grotto of ProPublica Illinois wrote , his organization’s ethics guidelines allow sources to remain unnamed “only when they insist upon it and when they provide vital information,” “when there is no other way to obtain that information” and when the journalist knows that the source is “knowledgeable and reliable.”

Typically, journalists share the names of these sources with their editors, who assess whether those criteria are met.

As the Society of Professional Journalists’ ethics code notes, “Consider sources’ motives before promising anonymity. Reserve anonymity for sources who may face danger, retribution or other harm, and have information that cannot be obtained elsewhere.”

Motives, of course, vary. The source may be acting as a whistleblower, exposing corruption or other illegal conduct. The source may feel compelled to share information with the public that is being withheld for some reason. Or — and good journalists know this — the source might have personal interests at heart. That does not necessarily disqualify the accuracy of the information, but it is why one standard of quality journalism is verification of facts by multiple sources.

News organizations that use unnamed sources owe it to their readers, viewers and listeners to clarify, as much as possible, why the source was granted anonymity, and why the source’s motives did not invalidate the value of the information.

The news consumer’s obligation

The challenge for news consumers is that the use of unnamed sources provides no outside way to verify what the journalist has written. We must decide whether to trust the journalist and the news organization. Fortunately, there are some actions we can take that help build that trust.

When evaluating a news article that uses unnamed sources, take a step back and engage in lateral reading* about the journalist who wrote the article and the news organization that published the report. Take a look at other articles by that journalist: How often does he use unnamed sources? (Is he lazy, or is he privy to officials who have great — but classified — information?) Does she write about this particular subject regularly, indicating that she has in-depth knowledge? Does the journalist also write opinion pieces? (If so, this could indicate a bias that must be evaluated.)

Consider, too, whether the journalist has provided sufficient context to determine whether the source is reliable and credible. In “When To Trust A Story That Uses Unnamed Sources,” Perry Bacon Jr. of FiveThirtyEight gives five details that readers should look for when considering a story that uses unnamed sources. His follow-up post, “Which Anonymous Sources Are Worth Paying Attention To?,” explains how to evaluate the description applied to an unnamed source — such as “a Pentagon official,” “a person familiar with” or “a law enforcement official.” The more details the journalist provides about a source, the more comfortable we can be trusting what that source has to say.

More fundamentally, has the article explained why the source was granted anonymity? Explaining why a source isn’t named — for example, attributing behind-the-scenes information about congressional action to “a committee aide who was not authorized to speak publicly about the meeting” — is something we can evaluate. Check to see if the news organization has a published policy on using unnamed sources (such as these from The Washington Post  and NPR ).

We shouldn’t dismiss the use of anonymous sources out of hand. Particularly when reporting about the government, journalists often must rely on sources who have a justifiable concern about being named; at the same time, they must recognize that using anonymous sources may make their work appear less credible. In 2013, Margaret Sullivan, then the public editor of The New York Times, quoted a national security editor who said of government sources, “It’s almost impossible to get people who know anything to talk,” especially on the record. “So we’re caught in this dilemma.”

As for that op-ed in The New York Times, the author is described as “a senior official in the Trump administration whose identity is known to us and whose job would be jeopardized by its disclosure.” Whether the opinion page editors made a good decision in publishing the piece remains up for debate. And that’s what we, as critical consumers of news, should be able to do: Evaluate the available information and make our own determination about the credibility of what was published.

Further reading:

• Chapter 59: Sources of information (The News Manual)
• “Which Anonymous Sources Are Worth Paying Attention To?”  (Perry Bacon Jr., FiveThirtyEight)
• “When To Trust A Story That Uses Unnamed Sources”  (Perry Bacon Jr., FiveThirtyEight)
• “How do you use an anonymous source? The mysteries of journalism everyone should know”  (Margaret Sullivan, The Washington Post)
• “Using anonymous sources with care” (H.L. Hall, Journalism Education Association)
• “What Does ‘Off the Record’ Really Mean?” (Matt Flegenheimer, The New York Times)

**The lateral reading concept and the term itself developed from research conducted by the Stanford History Education Group (SHEG), led by Sam Wineburg, founder and executive director of SHEG.

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How to Write a News Article: Naming Sources

• What Is News?
• How to Interview
• The Intro or Lede
• Article Format/Narrative
• How To Write A Review
• Writing News Style
• Naming Sources
• Revising/Proofreading
• Photos/Graphics
• The Future of News?

About Sources

A good reporter makes it clear where he or she got their information. Everything but the most obvious and commonly known facts should be attributed. When in doubt, don’t assume your reader knows. State where you got your information. The reader can then decide how reliable a story is.

As in an essay, the source needs to be named in the story:

• The mayor expressed his support of a designated zone for protesters.
• According to police records, the suspect had been arrested for fraud before.
• The jury will announce its decision tomorrow, the court bailiff stated.

Unlike an essay, the source does not need a text citation in the story after each attribution or to be listed in a reference or works cited list.

All quotes must be attributed . Include the name of the person speaking in the sentence and surround their exact words in quotations marks. 

• For example – Former President George Bush said, “Read my lips. No new taxes!”
• Never change what someone said – Doublecheck if you’re not sure of the exact wording.
• If a grammatical error in the exact quotation might make the person look bad, then the reporter needs to decide if it would be unfair to leave the mistake. Check with your editor.

Use multiple sources. Stories are more balanced when multiple points of view are presented. Make sure you don’t use just the official source for information. Try to talk with all parties involved.

• For example – A story on panhandling needs to include information from people who ask for money, people who’ve been asked for money, people who’ve given money, and people who refused – not just city officials.

Because sources have different perspectives, their information may contradict. The reporter has a responsibility to doublecheck information for accuracy.

• In the example above, any claim of increased panhandling should be checked with public records. Is there an increase in complaints or police action? Can you observe for yourself or ask people who regularly drive those streets for their observation?

It's a challenge for any organization.

• Only 1% of all the stories The Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism examined during the Clinton-Lewinsky saga used two or more named sources.

In particular, any opinion must be attributed. Adding the opinion of persons involved in the story can add personal perspective to a story. However, the reporter should never include or shape the story to show his or her opinion. The reporter's job is to build a complete picture that the reader can base a decision on.

More About Sources

• 4 Best Plagiarism Checker Tools
• Advice on attribution for journalists
• Anonymous Sources
• Editor’s guide to identifying plagiarism
• Fairness and Accuracy in Media
• Quotes and Attribution
• Sources and confidentiality
• Sources of information
• Talk to the Newsroom: The Use of Anonymous Sources
• What is plagiarism?
• << Previous: Writing News Style
• Next: Headlines >>
• Last Updated: Oct 23, 2023 11:28 AM
• URL: https://spcollege.libguides.com/news

Module 9: Beyond the Research Paper

Journalism and investigative reporting, learning objectives.

Identify characteristics of effective journalism and investigative reporting

News messages are often broken into three categories: “hard” news, “soft” news or features, and opinion. “Hard” news comprises reports of important issues, current events, and other topics that inform citizens about what is going on in the world and their communities while “soft” news covers those things that are not necessarily important and are handled with a lighter approach. Opinion pieces, unlike the other two which value “objectivity,” are subjective and will have a specific point of view.

• Breaking news  – Sometimes referred to as “the first take on history” breaking news stories provide as clear and accurate an accounting of some kind of event as possible while it is happening. In reporting about wildfires raging in the west, the breaking news story requires a timely accounting of what’s happening, with a tight focus on the “who, what, when, where, why” and it requires well-honed observation and interviewing skills. For the breaking news story, the information tasks for the reporters are to show up, assess the situation, use their senses to cover the event and learn more information through first-person interviews. Breaking news provides the “need to know” information as an event unfolds.
• Depth report  – The depth report is the story after the breaking news report. The goals for journalists preparing a depth report are to try to help people understand how the event happened, who was affected, what is being done about it, how people are reacting. For instance, in the aftermath of a story about wildfires in the West, the reporter’s information tasks would include gathering background information about the firefighting efforts, the economic impact of the fires, the reactions of home and business owners, the potential impact that the weather might have on future similar events. As with the breaking news story, the journalist is transmitting information, not opinion and they must be able to identify the most knowledgeable sources.
• Analysis or interpretive report  – The focus here is on an issue, problem or controversy. The substance of the report is still a verifiable fact, not opinion. But instead of presenting facts as with breaking news or a depth report and hoping the facts speak for themselves, the reporter writing an interpretive piece clarifies, explains, analyzes. The report usually focuses on WHY something has (or has not) happened. The information tasks are greater for this type of report, due to the need to clarify and explain rather than simply narrate. An analysis of the wildfires might look into how environmental policy or urban sprawl factored into the event. Analyses generally require learning about different perspectives or ranges of opinion from a variety of experts and more “digging” into causes.
• Investigative report  – Unlike the analysis which follows up on a news event, the information tasks for an investigative report require journalists to uncover information that will not be handed to them, these stories are reported by opening closed doors and closed mouths. These are the stories that expose problems or controversies authorities may not want to see covered. This requires unearthing hidden or previously unorganized information in order to clarify, explain and analyze something. A key technique used in investigative reports is data analysis. In the aftermath of the wildfires, a news organization might investigate the insurance claims process or how a charitable organization that received relief funds for fire victims actually allocated the money. The investigative report requires the communicator to have a high level of information sophistication, and the ability to convey complex information in a straightforward way for the audience.
• News  – A story about a man who used cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) to revive a pet dog rescued from the bottom of a pool might be reported as a news feature. It is based on an event, but covered as a feature, but the information tasks require gathering material to put more emphasis on the drama of the event than on the information about how to do CPR on a dog.
• Personality sketch or profile  – A story about the accomplishments, attitudes and characteristics of an individual seeks to capture the essence of a person. This requires both thorough backgrounding of the subject and skills in interviewing as information tasks. The communicator has to have a well-honed ability for noticing details that bring to life what is interesting or unique about the person.
• Informative  – A sidebar to accompany a main news story might be written as an informative feature. For example, an informative feature that describes the various methods firefighters use to combat wildfires might accompany a breaking news story. The information tasks for the reporter include a good command of sometimes-technical information to convey the story to the audience.
• Historical  – Holidays are often the inspiration for this type of piece, with focus on the history of the Christmas tree, the first Thanksgiving dinner, etc. The curious communicator could also create features about the anniversary of the founding of an important local business or the celebration of statehood using background archival documents. The information tasks for these types of reports obviously require locating and interpreting extensive historical information.
• Descriptive  – Many features are about places people can visit, or events they can attend. Tourist spots, historical sites, recreational areas, and festivals all generate reams of feature story copy, pictures and video. Public relations specialists often have a significant hand in generating much of the background information in these types of features and promoting these events or places to the news media. The information tasks include finding a fresh and engaging angle for the content.
• How-to  – Some features are created to provide information about how to improve your golf game, become a power-shopper, install your own shower tile. The communicator has to have a solid grasp of the subject matter to do a respectable job with this type of piece. The information tasks for how-to features include the need for material that is descriptive, specific, and very clearly communicated.
• Editorials – The editorial is a reflection of management’s attitude rather than a reporter’s or editor’s personal view. Most are unsigned and run on a specific page of the newspaper or website or during a particular time of the broadcast. Editorials usually seek to do one of three things: commend or condemn some action; persuade the audience to some point of view; or entertain and amuse the audience. The information tasks for an editorial include locating and using credible information as evidence for whatever position is being taken.
• Columns – A column includes the personal opinions of the writer on the state of the community and the world. Many columns are written by syndicated, national writers, but local commentators and columnists also have a following in their communities. Columnists use information selectively, based on their point of view and the argument they are making. Columnists’ information tasks include maintaining a consistent “voice” and approach to each topic.
• Reviews – Reviewers make informed judgments about the content and quality of something presented to the public–books, films, theater, television programs, concerts, recorded music, art exhibits, restaurants. The responsibility of reviewers is to report and evaluate on behalf of the audience. The information must be descriptive as well as evaluative. The reviewer describes the concert and then makes an evaluation of the quality of the performance. Reviewers’ information tasks require them to be deeply knowledgeable about the type of content or activity they are reviewing, as well as having an opinion about it.

Why does this matter? If journalists don’t create stories that inform and engage their audience those people will find other outlets to satisfy their information needs. Journalism serves not only a public need, it is also a business and a business without customers won’t be in business for long.

News organizations conduct user surveys and track audience behavior just as other kinds of companies do.  The better journalists are able to understand their readership the better able they will be to anticipate and address their audiences needs. With the ability to track digital readership, journalists know what articles people read. At the start of the message analysis process journalists must ask a set of questions about their target audience that will help them identify the treatment of the topic about which they will be writing and make decisions about the kind of reporting they must do.

Understanding the audience that uses the publication or media outlet for which they are producing a news report will help clarify some of the following questions:

WHO:  Who reads / views the publication? Who would be interested in this topic? Who needs to know about this topic? Who is the media organization interested in attracting with its offerings?

WHAT : What would the potential audience member want to know about the topic? What kind of report would be most informative or helpful for the audience? What kind of information will be useful? What does the audience already know about this?

WHERE:  Where else do people interested in the topic find information? (For freelancers) Where should I pitch my story idea?

WHEN:  When does the audience need to get this information (is this fast-breaking news, or something that will be used as analysis after the event?)

WHY:  Why does the audience need to know this? Why does the audience care? Sometimes the audience member just wants to fill empty minutes with a news message (reading news briefs on a mobile device while standing in a line or eating alone at a restaurant). Sometimes the audience member needs to answer a specific question (who won the baseball game this afternoon? when does the movie start?). Each of these “why” questions suggests a different strategy for the communicator.

HOW:  How can we best communicate to the audience? How much background do they need to understand what we are writing about? How technical can we be? How might the audience react to this report?

• News Messages / Audience. Authored by : Kathleen A. Hansen and Nora Paul. Located at : https://open.lib.umn.edu/infostrategies/chapter/2-4-news-messages/ . Project : Information Strategies for Communicators . License : CC BY: Attribution
• Newspaper. Provided by : The Creative Exchange. Located at : https://unsplash.com/photos/9WuHgaEQagY . License : CC BY: Attribution

5 Attribute All Sources

Kerry Benson

Learning Objectives

After reading this chapter, you will be able to:

• Distinguish between primary and secondary, and human and nonhuman sources.
• Explain why and when attribution is necessary.
• Use proper mechanics of attribution.
• Embed links to online sources in digital text.

Ladybug Rock, by Mark Caton

My father, a Presbyterian minister, rarely used the King James Version of the Bible, so I remember vividly when he referenced the Apostle Paul’s letter to the Romans from the KJV.

Romans 13:7 reads: “Render therefore to all their dues: tribute to whom tribute is due; custom to whom custom; fear to whom fear; honour to whom honour.”

Because I was a child, the language of the passage confused me, and I asked my dad what it meant. He laughed before briefly summing up Paul’s message.

“It pretty much means you give people recognition for what they’ve done,” my dad said. “Like when your mom and I really liked the ladybug rock you brought home from school and you told us Mark Caton was the one who painted it. You gave Mark what was due to him, the credit for being the painter, instead of telling us you’d done it.”

Not everyone needs a biblical lesson on giving credit where it’s due. And credit isn’t necessarily an acknowledgment of excellence, as Mark Caton could have done a poor job of painting a ladybug on stone, but in journalism and strategic communications attribution is like that ladybug: a rock. It’s one of the ethical (and often lawful) foundations of a news or feature story, a documentary, a company news release, a digital ad, or a marketing PowerPoint.

This chapter will help illuminate the concept of attribution, why it matters, who uses it, who benefits from its use, when it’s used, and why professionals may disagree on its use. This chapter also will address how to journalistically cite sources, how attribution can go wrong, and where to find more on the topic.

What is Attribution?

Reputable and engrossing writing, whether it’s journalism or strategic communication, starts with responsible and principled research and reporting. Attribution is vital to all ethical reporting because it identifies information sources.

The Accrediting Council on Education in Journalism and Mass Communications (ACEJMC), which accredits journalism schools, lists core values and competencies all graduates should be able to meet. Among those competencies is the ability to “demonstrate an understanding of professional ethical principles and work ethically in pursuit of truth, accuracy, fairness and diversity.” Attribution is key to the quest for veracity and transparency. Attribution’s job in journalism is to answer the “who” of a quotation, the “where” and “what” of background information, and –- sometimes –- the “how.”

Who said what? Where did reporters or editors get their data? What research was used to support an opinion? How did a human source provide those statistics?

Understanding attribution requires understanding sources.

Primary Sources

If a human contributes information for a story, whether it’s in-person, on the phone, or via email or text, that person is a source. The most credible human source is a primary one, a person with a direct connection to the information or situation pertinent to the story.

This first-hand relationship provides for an accurate telling of that person’s experience. Even though the source’s personal viewpoint can be an opinion, it can also provide a reporter with facts. It’s the reporter’s responsibility to confirm the facts. An exception to this is if the journalist is the witness to events. Journalists can’t name themselves as sources in articles.

Primary human sources also add what it sounds like –- humanness. They put a face to the facts and a person to the perspective. Often they can synthesize information in a way that makes it accessible and easy to understand for other people.

Any person who contributes any kind of information to a story is a human source, even if that material is never published or broadcast.

Primary human source examples:

Chadwick Boseman, star of the Disney and Marvel Studios film “Black Panther,” says in a 2018 interview with USA Today how respectful he is of the cinematic history the movie was about to make.

Infections, like the kind caused by what the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention call “nightmare bacteria,” are drug-resistant and “virtually untreatable with modern medicine,” CDC Principal Deputy Director Dr. Anne Schuchat said in a press briefing .

The reporter in each scenario above indicates to readers or viewers where the information originates. The importance of primary source credibility is clear. The main actor in a film will know about acting in that film. Schuchat, who served as acting director of the CDC twice, will know the agency’s public health concerns and alerts.

A journalist could probably get the same information from a nonhuman source, but Boseman and Schuchat put a trustworthy human face to the communication they’re sharing.

Primary sources also can be nonhuman. Government records, reports of original research studies, and polls are examples of primary sources because they are the original locations of the information they contain. A nonhuman source is primary if it provides original information that does not cite other sources.

Some sources, like research studies, often are both primary and secondary sources, because they both re-state information found elsewhere, and are the original sources of other information.

Primary nonhuman source examples:

April is designated as Alcohol Awareness Month by the federal government. A journalist developing a story about drug and alcohol trends among seniors, or in a specific geographical region, might use data published by the National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence (NCADD), a primary nonhuman source.

Marketers at a major health care organization choose similarly to highlight the importance of alcohol awareness, and they also provide NCADD data in a story in their monthly e-zine or quarterly newsletter. NCADD serves as a primary nonhuman source. The marketers supplement their story with human primary sources from within their organization, such as physicians and counselors.

Journalists and strategic communicators should not leave their audience to question information or sources’ legitimacy. The exception is if something is a well-known –- or widely reported –- fact that’s reasonably indisputable.For example, it would not be necessary to cite a source for “Abraham Lincoln, the 16th president of the United States, delivered what would come to be known as ‘The Gettysburg Address’ in November 1863.”

Secondary Sources

Both human and nonhuman sources also can be secondary sources, or research material. A secondary source is information containing others’ reporting and data gathering, and it’s usually information used for other purposes as well as a journalist or strategic communicator’s purposes.

Journalists must determine if the secondary source information is fact or opinion, or both, which they usually do by cross-referencing the information with other verifiable sources.

If a reporter looks to a website for background information, or reads other media reports on a story, it’s the reporter’s responsibility to go to the information’s original, or primary, source.

Avoid quoting The New York Times or Fox News as a source from their stories on obesity in the United States. Go to the primary source those media reference. If they cite a study, or data released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), go to that study or to the CDC website. After verifying the information, cite the study or the CDC.

For example, a reporter working on an article about border crossings along the United States’ southern border sees a CNN report on a similar story, using data about who is crossing and where. The reporter should look for the source of the data, not CNN’s information. If the numbers are from U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the reporter should go to CBP for its facts and figures, and cite it as the source.

Often journalists use secondary sources as a springboard to develop a story idea, including a single exposé, an in-depth series of articles or podcasts, or a documentary. From these secondary sources, they look for the primary sources of information, and use those in their reports.

When To Attribute?

The late journalist Steve Buttry, whose résumé included editor, reporter, newsroom trainer, and teacher of digital journalism, wrote the following in a blog post, “You can quote me on that: Advice on attribution for journalists” :

“Attribute any time that attribution strengthens the credibility of a story. Attribute any time you are using someone else’s words. Attribute when you are reporting information gathered by other journalists. Attribute when you are not certain of facts. Attribute statements of opinion. When you wonder whether you should attribute, you probably should attribute in some fashion.”

Buttry’s advice from the same post on when not to use attribution is shorter:

“Don’t attribute facts that the reporter observed first-hand: It was a sunny day. Don’t worry about attributing facts where the source is obvious and not particularly important and the fact is not in dispute.”

Journalists and strategic communicators who write or report factual information or opinions should attribute all those facts and opinions to a source. In some circumstances, attribution is particularly important. Attribute facts if controversy might surround them, such as when gun permit requests go up or down, or the number of middle-aged men addicted to opioids changes dramatically. Also, always attribute evaluative facts that depend on the rule of law, or facts that rely on an expert’s information.

In broadcast, reporters and podcasters should identify the source of any statement, particularly one of questionable accuracy. The source interviewed in a radio, podcast or videotaped segment must be identified at the start. The newscaster, reporter, or podcaster can identify with a sound bite before the source speaks.

With video, a source can be acknowledged verbally and with a lower third super, a graphic, usually the interviewee’s name and location, superimposed along the bottom of the screen.

Why Attribute?

Both journalists and strategic communicators use attribution to signal to their audiences that they’re reliable and sincere. It indicates that they’ve vetted the sources, which helps readers, listeners and viewers understand the information effortlessly, without having to stop and question the content’s accuracy and authenticity.

Journalists and strategic communicators benefit from using attribution, because the trust that their audience places in the sources they cite extends to the journalists and strat comm practitioners themselves.

Good attribution says to the audience, “You can trust me because the sources I use are trustworthy.”

Individual media companies underscore the importance of attribution in their values statements. According to The Associated Press , the goal of attribution is “to provide a reader with enough information to have full confidence in the story’s veracity.”

Attribution also lets the journalist or strat comm practitioner share or shift the responsibility for any information in a story. If a reader disagrees with something he or she sees in an article or report, attribution can take the heat off the journalist or strategic communicator who wrote the piece, and direct it toward the source of the information.

When a reader or viewer questions the veracity of some information, attribution says, “Blame the message source, not the messenger.”

Attribution also allows audience members to examine a topic further. By pointing to their sources, journalists and strat comm practitioners invite their readers and viewers to find those sources for themselves, and to take deeper dives into the topics they cover.

Attribution is like the entryway to Platform 9 3/4 in the Harry Potter books, from which readers can set off on their own journeys into the subjects that interest them.

Finally, attribution can be the antidote to journalism’s biggest transgressions of fabrication and plagiarism. A journalist or strat comm practitioner who points to his or her sources is less likely to have made up something, or taken credit for someone else’s words, than one whose sources are hidden.

There is sometimes a misguided perception that attribution is less important in strategic communication than it is in news and broadcast journalism.

The Public Relations Society of America, for one, opposes this view. It argues in its Ethical Standards Advisories — Best Practices , that despite the pressures of time and shortage of resources that all content creators face, public relations practitioners have a duty to disclose their sources:

“Public relations professionals may be … challenged when facing a deadline, an assignment in a new area or even the lack of a good idea and the easy solution may be to use someone else’s words or ideas. However, an ethical practitioner respects and protects information that comes into his or her possession and makes an effort to preserve the integrity of that information.

“An ethical practitioner also uses the works of others appropriately, with proper author/creator attribution. There are many ways to do this … including footnotes, parenthetical references to the original author or a reference to the original work within the text. When words are used verbatim, it is important that they be enclosed in quotation marks and the exact source of the quote be provided either within the text or in a reference section.”

These guidelines reflect the professional standards expected of all communications professionals.

How To Attribute?

How to select quotes is part of learning to build an article, newscast, or magazine story, but how to assign responsibility to quotes is part of understanding attribution.

Direct quotes

The following comes from guidelines used in the School of Journalism and Mass Communications at the University of Kansas.

A direct quote must be exactly what a source says. Direct quotes should add zest to the story. Don’t use quotes to deliver boring-but-necessary facts or use quotes that don’t drive the story forward.

Direct quotes are used also for precision. An accurate direct quote can add confirmation of controversial facts.

It can convey a person’s information and attitude, which adds character and flavor to a story.

Examples of direct quotes:

“It’s just a job. Grass grows, birds fly, waves pound the sand. I beat people up,” boxer Muhammad Ali said.

“I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed,” basketball legend Michael Jordan said. “I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”

“That’s all I could ever hope for, to have a positive effect on women. ‘Cos women are powerful, powerful beings,” singer Rihanna said. “But they’re also the most doubtful beings. They’ll never know – we’ll never know – how powerful we are.”

Say “no” to quotes that add nothing, such as “we’re so excited,” and “we went out there and did our best.” Obvious. Goofy. This may be difficult for strategic communicators whose bosses or supervisors may press for hyperbole. Resist. It damages credibility.

But journalists and strategic communicators often include direct quotes from public officials or company executives, even if what’s said doesn’t push the story forward or add flavor, because readers and viewers see those figures as authorities who should know what’s going on.

Paraphrasing

A paraphrase, or indirect quote, is a re-wording of what a source says. It must reflect the source accurately, even though it’s not relayed word for word. An indirect quote must not alter the meaning of what someone said.

In incorporating quotes into their writing, journalists often mix direct and indirect quotes.

This is the direct quote:

“When I first started teaching J101, I like, was happy to have – wow, like, 450 students, but then I had doubts,” Benson said. “But I wanted to teach many students at once. I thought I could teach that many. But, wow, managing a huge class is like turning a cruise ship in a hurricane.”

This is the paraphrase, or indirect quote:

Benson said she is happy to teach J101, a course with 450 students, but initially had doubts.

The writer could then use a partial quote to support the paraphrase:

She compared managing a class that size to “turning a cruise ship in a hurricane.”

Handling human quotes

When referring to information given by specific human sources, the verb in print is “said,” even if a writer isn’t directly quoting a source. “Said” is best because it can’t be wrong. If a source said something, the source spoke and said it. “Said” doesn’t stop thought when a reader sees it.

Verbs such as “explained” or “disclosed” or “exclaimed” require a reader to process differently. Such verbs draw attention to themselves and away from the content that matters. Readers have to think about each verb because those have connotations that “said” does not.

Weird verbs of attribution, such as argued, claimed, concluded, warned, urged and remarked, are just that, weird. Writers don’t want to imply meaning that might alter the larger article’s credibility. “Said” as a verb is neutral. It doesn’t hint at any meaning beyond its action.

Handling nonhuman quotes

“According to” is used to attribute information to nonhuman sources. Journalists and strategic communicators should use “according to” for documents, news releases, studies, statistical abstracts, infographics, or secondary sources in general.

In journalism and strategic communication, writers do not use in-text citations. That is, in journalism, there is no MLA, APA, or Chicago citation style. Save that for English, history, and political science research papers. In journalism, for in-text source identification, if it’s not “said,” it is usually “according to.”

As with “said,” there is no need to come up with different terms.

Examples of nonhuman attributions:

Teachers in the district make at least three times as much per year as teachers in other area school districts, according to state employment records.

According to a World Health Organization report, this season’s flu strain may infect millions worldwide.

Student athletes are graduating at rates twice as high as they were a decade ago, according to NCAA findings.

But that’s so repetitive

Journalists and strategic communicators, particularly if they hear their English composition teachers in their heads, may resist “said” or “according to” for every attribution in a story. They fear the repetitive use will make their writing dull and unvaried. But readers appreciate the ease of reading, so they’re not usually troubled by “said” or “according to.”

Attribution terms may vary by news organization or publication. Some journalists have the option to use alternatives, such as “stated” for human sources. Magazine writers often have the editorial leeway to use “says” – using present tense even if they’re attributing content a source provided in an interview a day, a week, or a month prior to publication. But writers can’t be wrong with “said” when attributing a human source.

Order matters

Attribution can work at the beginning of a sentence, but often is even better at the end of the sentence. This places the emphasis on the information first, then on the source.

Starting with the quote or paraphrase, and then providing attribution, is more interesting for readers than the other way around. Presumably, what a person is saying is more interesting than who’s saying it. If it’s a well-chosen quote, the information is what’s important or relevant, and the attribution is just for context and credibility.

Grammar notes

In English, writers usually put the verb after the subject in declarative sentences. Not always, but it keeps the emphasis on the subject. Remember, “Jesus wept.”

The order of name and verb is, when possible, name, then verb.

Correct example:

“The scientist examining the evidence couldn’t conclude the origin of the DNA,” Fontaine said.

Incorrect example:

“The scientist examining the evidence couldn’t conclude the origin of the DNA,” said Fontaine.

Exception example: When there’s a title or description that makes it awkward:

“The scientist examining the evidence couldn’t conclude the origin of the DNA,” said Elliot Fontaine, Colorado Springs police spokesman in charge of the investigation.

Incorrect exception example:

“The scientist examining the evidence couldn’t conclude the origin of the DNA,” Elliot Fontaine, Colorado Springs police spokesman in charge of the investigation, said.

Broadcast specifics

Broadcast attribution differs from print in several ways. Direct quotations are rare. Radio, television and podcast writers prefer indirect quotes or statement summaries.

Direct quotes, if used, should be preceded by a phrase such as “in his words” or “what she called.” Quotation marks should also be shown. They give broadcasters a clue, or signpost, to change their vocal pattern.

Broadcast example:

President Donald Trump says he will roll back all policies and laws from what he called “Obama’s clown car of a presidency.”

If it’s critical that a source be quoted directly, a broadcaster or writer may use sound bites, or actualities, in the audio. Attribution is always given before sources speak. It must be clear from the start that the quote is not the broadcaster’s thoughts or opinions.

With radio or podcasts, because listeners use only their ears to absorb the information, they need to know right away who’s responsible for what’s being said. It’s too cumbersome to inject “quote and unquote” into broadcast to indicate to listeners what is and isn’t a direct quote.

An identifier, such as a title, always goes before the name in broadcast.

Broadcast identifier example:

New York City Mayor Bill DeBlasio says he will support the new NYPD policy change on overtime pay.

With TV or video, the visual shows who’s making the statement, and a character generator super (or lower third) identifies the person after three or four seconds of video. The anchor or reporter may or may not identify the source by name in the introduction, but usually provides an identifier for context.

Broadcast lead-in example:

If the KU chancellor says,

“The number of both undergraduate and graduate students suffering from food insecurity rose 48 percent between 2015 and today.”

The broadcaster might lead into the sound bite with a synopsis: Chancellor Doug Girod says food insecurity is on the increase among students at KU.

In broadcast, source attribution and identification should be written conversationally. Think of it as the difference between a formal, engraved invitation delivered by the postal service and an e-vite via email or social media.

Be careful with pronouns. Again, because listeners and viewers can’t refer back easily in a video or audio story, they may not remember, “She? Who is she?” It’s better to repeat a name, office or title to prevent confusion.

Use “says” and not said, as if it’s happening now. “Says” is present tense and describes an ongoing action. But when broadcasters are speaking to something a source said in the past, “said” makes more sense.

Broadcast says/said example:

Chancellor Doug Girod says food insecurity is on the rise among KU students. Before he became chancellor, Girod said he would address food scarcity across campus.

Broadcast style also may allow for “according to” when using human sources. It may be a matter of news organization policy.

Embedding Links: Digital Attribution

The Internet allows journalists and strat comm practitioners to elevate their attribution game by embedding links in their work to the sources that are available online.

If you are producing content for digital distribution, link, link, link. Linking goes hand in hand with attributing online content, whether it’s news or strategic communication. Readers can –- even if they don’t –- click on links that provide background and full context to the cited information.

Linking is about transparency and trust with readers. Linking to sources in articles and reports increases the transparency of the journalists’ and strategic communicators’ work. It brings readers closer to the sources, encouraging them to verify the veracity of the information they are reading.

If attribution is like giving your friend an address to a restaurant, embedding a source’s link is like holding the restaurant’s door open for your friend when they arrive.

Any source that can be linked in an online article, should be linked. Not doing so can raise questions in an audience’s mind about why the source isn’t linked.

What Embedded Sources Look Like

Here are two examples of what embedding looks like in professional publications.

The following screenshot shows a paragraph in a Lawrence Journal-World, July 13, 2018, article titled “ New Kansas AD Jeff Long addresses still-defunct KU-MU Border War .”

The link in the paragraph takes readers to an Oct. 22, 2017, article titled “ Bill Self on playing Mizzou: ‘I don’t think there’s been any change in our position .’”

The next screenshot shows two paragraphs from a July 14, 2018, article, “ IceCube: Unlocking the Secrets of Cosmic Rays ,” published on the website Space.com .

The link in the second paragraph leads to a FAQ page on the website of the University of Wisconsin’s South Pole Neutrino Observatory .

The URLs for the articles presented above are:

http://www2.ljworld.com/weblogs/tale-tait/2018/jul/13/new-kansas-ad-jeff-long-addresses-still/ , http://www2.kusports.com/news/2017/oct/22/bill-self-playing-mizzou-i-dont-think-theres-been-/

https://www.space.com/41170-icecube-neutrino-observatory.html , https://www.space.com/ , https://icecube.wisc.edu/about/faq

  https://icecube.wisc.edu/ .

But the professional examples do not show their readers these strips of URL code.

This is because a name or description that identifies exactly where readers are going when they click on the link is more welcoming than an incomprehensible string of code. A linked snippet of text gives readers the ability to choose their web source with confidence, and it looks much more professional than raw URL.

How to Embed Links to Online Sources

You probably already are familiar with inserting source links into documents, emails, social media posts, or presentations by copying and pasting the URLs of the sources. It takes eight steps to embed a link (also called a hyperlink) in text.

• Browse to the source’s webpage.
• At the top of the browser, locate the URL field (URL stands for “uniform resource locator”).
• Highlight the entire URL and copy it (Command+C, or Control+C, or Edit > Copy).
• In the document you are writing, write a statement that will serve as the link. It could be a descriptor, such as KU J-School Technology , or it could be more directive and fun, such as Start here to learn how best to use your technology.
• Highlight the text you just typed.
• Use the “insert hyperlink” tool in the platform you are using. Here are some visual examples of where to find these tools. The link tool often is represented graphically with two links of a little chain.

Google Doc:

Blackboard:

PowerPoint:

• In the dialog box that appears, paste the source URL into the appropriate field. Oftentimes, you will see the text you highlighted in this box as well.
• Test the link using a different browser or computer than you used originally. This is especially important for links that originate behind paywalls.

What If a Source Wants To Remain Anonymous?

Avoid using unidentified sources for news or strategic communication documents. But this might depend on newsroom or organization policy. It’s usually not acceptable, as trust and transparency are the agreement readers, viewers, and listeners have with media content providers.

Exceptions are sometimes made when the only way to get a story is to offer a source anonymity. It shouldn’t be given lightly and without understanding that the information must still be reliable and accurate.

Reasons to offer anonymity could include a situation where by providing a name, the source would suffer public humiliation, lose a job or position, or go to jail.

If an anonymous source must be used, offer as much detail as possible about the source and explain the reason for anonymity.

For example, name a source as “a university official with ties to the administration who requested anonymity because his superiors had ordered him not to speak publicly or he would lose his position.”

When a source requests anonymity, get the source’s name and contact information, just in case an editor needs it.

The following are examples of ethical codes and policies journalists follow when deciding to use anonymous sources or pseudonyms.

Under Associated Press rules , material from anonymous sources may be used only if:

• The material is information and not opinion or speculation, and is vital to the news report.
• The information is not available except under the conditions of anonymity imposed by the source.
• The source is reliable, and in a position to have accurate information.

The Society of Professional Journalists published  a position paper on anonymous sources:

• Identify sources whenever feasible. The public is entitled to as much information as possible on sources’ reliability.
• The most important professional possession of journalists is credibility. If the news consumers don’t have faith that the stories they are reading or watching are accurate and fair, if they suspect information attributed to an anonymous source has been made up, then the journalists are as useful as a parka at the equator.
• To protect their credibility and the credibility of their stories, reporters should use every possible avenue to confirm and attribute information before relying on unnamed sources. If the only way to publish a story that is of importance to the audience is to use anonymous sources, the reporter owes it to the readers to identify the source as clearly as possible without pointing a figure at the person who has been granted anonymity. If the investigating police officer confirms John Doe has been arrested, the officer is a “source in the police department” and not even a pronoun should point to the gender.

The Washington Post Standards and Ethics: Policy on Sources and Confidential Sources

• The Washington Post is committed to disclosing to its readers the sources of the information in its stories to the maximum possible extent. We want to make our reporting as transparent to the readers as possible so they may know how and where we got our information. Transparency is honest and fair, two values we cherish.
• Sources often insist that we agree not to name them before they agree to talk with us. We must be reluctant to grant their wish. When we use an unnamed source, we are asking our readers to take an extra step to trust the credibility of the information we are providing. We must be certain in our own minds that the benefit to readers is worth the cost in credibility.
• In some circumstances, we will have no choice but to grant confidentiality to sources. We recognize that there are situations in which we can give our readers better, fuller information by allowing sources to remain unnamed than if we insist on naming them. We realize that in many circumstances, sources will be unwilling to reveal to us information about corruption in their own organizations, or high-level policy disagreements, for example, if disclosing their identities could cost them their jobs or expose them to harm. Nevertheless, granting anonymity to a source should not be done casually or automatically.
• Named sources are vastly to be preferred to unnamed sources. Reporters should press to have sources go on the record. We have learned over the years that persistently pushing sources to identify themselves actually works—not always, of course, but more often than many reporters initially expect. If a particular source refuses to allow us to identify him or her, the reporter should consider seeking the information elsewhere.
• Editors have an obligation to know the identity of unnamed sources used in a story, so that editors and reporters can jointly assess the appropriateness of using them. Some sources may insist that a reporter not reveal their identity to her editors; we should resist this. When it happens, the reporter should make clear that information so obtained cannot be published. The source of anything that is published will be known to at least one editor.
• We prefer at least two sources for factual information in Post stories that depends on confidential informants, and those sources should be independent of each other. We prefer sources with firsthand or direct knowledge of the information. A relevant document can sometimes serve as a second source. There are situations in which we will publish information from a single source, but we should only do so after deliberations involving the executive editor, the managing editor and the appropriate department head. The judgment to use a single source depends on the source’s reliability and the basis for the source’s information.
• We must strive to tell our readers as much as we can about why our unnamed sources deserve our confidence. Our  obligation  is to serve readers, not sources. This means avoiding attributions to “sources” or “informed sources.” Instead we should try to give the reader something more, such as “sources familiar with the thinking of defense lawyers in the case,” or “sources whose work brings them into contact with the county executive,” or “sources on the governor’s staff who disagree with his policy.”

How To Attribute Information From an Email, a Text, or a Social Media Post?

If a credible source responds to an interview in an email, attribution should indicate this.

Email attribution example:

The CEO of Mosette Healthcare Group, Lana Dunham, wrote in an email that she plans to merge the group with St. Catherine’s Health Systems.

Social media posts are tricky and should serve primarily as story ideas to pursue.

According to National Public Radio’s ethics handbook, social platforms can serve as good newsgathering tools, but NPR said that it:

“requires the same diligence we exercise when reporting in other environments. When NPR bloggers post about breaking news, they do not cite anonymous posts on social media sites — though they may use information they find there to guide their reporting. They carefully attribute the information they cite and are clear about what NPR has and has not been able to confirm.”

Also, social media users aren’t always who they say they are, which poses a verification problem. If it’s reasonably possible to identify an account and the posts or tweets coming from it, use something like this to attribute:

Social media example

Illinois Senator Tammy Duckworth , who gave birth to her second child on April 9, tweeted on April 19: “May have to vote today. Maile’s outfit is prepped. Made sure she has a jacket so she doesn’t violate the Senate floor dress code requiring blazers.Not sure what the policy is on duckling onesies but I think we’re ready”

Tweeted, posted, shared. Use the appropriate attribution verbs for their social platforms.

How To Attribute a File, Archive or Stock Photo or Video?

It must be attributed to its original source. Include the title, author, source and date it was accessed.

The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Photography Collection, The New York Public Library. “Farmhouse and family of resettlement client. Waldo County, Maine.” New York Public Library Digital Collections. Accessed April 19, 2018. NYPL Digital Collections

Attribute any Creative Commons photos or video by identifying the title of the work, the author or creator, the source (where it’s found) and license type. All Creative Commons work has a license type, which must be acknowledged.

Find specifics about CC attribution best practices here: Creative Commons attribution guidelines

To identify the digital rights of an image, use a search, such as the one developed by the Visual Resources Association: Image search resource

News Releases

Reproducing news releases – either sent or gathered from a website – has been a lively topic in nearly all news centers that use releases and among all organizations and businesses that send or post them.

Raymond James attorney and KU alum Ellyn Angelotti Kamke wrote about attribution and its squishy spots for The Poynter Institute. In a 2013 article, Kamke addressed the sometimes-disputed issue of plagiarism-without-attribution in which some journalists view verbatim news release use.

In her article, Kamke raised the question many in the industry ask frequently, “How should journalists use and attribute information that comes from an official source via press release, a prepared statement an official social-media account or some other widely distributed avenue?”

Attribute. Attribute. Attribute. For transparency and credibility. Attributed material, Kamke wrote, “even when it comes from an official source, gives the audience more context about that information and how it was acquired by the writer.”

Strategic communicators, such as those specializing in public relations, want their material used and more often than not put the research and good writing into a news release so it’s fit for immediate publication with minimal editing. But even PR professionals see the value of readers knowing the sources and making their own decisions about their veracity.

Peer Tutorial: Attribution Review

In this video , Maggie Gould and Paige Moyer (JOUR 302, fall 2018) review the key types of attribution.

A Practitioner’s View

Mike Miller

B.S., KU Journalism, 2000

Senior Director, Editorial, NBC Sports Digital

NBC Sports Digital, including flagship sites NBCSports.com, Rotoworld and ProFootballTalk, serves a sports audience that craves sports news and analysis. How do we do that? We do some original reporting and we rely on extensive story aggregation.

Any story that isn’t reported by our writers is explicitly credited and linked to high up in the story, sometimes in the initial graf. Our editorial standard is that we don’t do lengthy excerpts or extensive quoting (why reproduce what the original story already has?), because we don’t want any confusion as to where the original story originates.

Excerpts are italicized, set off with quotes, or both. It should clearly be separated from the rest of the story.

For us, this places the onus on our writers to extend that aggregated story with a specific editorial take or analysis that drives the story forward. If we can’t break the story, we tell our audience why it’s important, which helps the original story’s credibility (we create awareness) and gives us some authority through analysis.

Activity 1: Search

Locate a recent news article or press release. Evaluate what source types — primary and secondary, and human and nonhuman sources — the author consulted and how the author cited these sources. Does the author follow the practices recommended in this chapter? If not, specifically how could the article or press release be improved? Summarize your suggestions in one or two paragraphs.

Activity 2: Credibility check

Find a published piece from the Associated Press or The Washington Post that cites an anonymous source. After reading the piece, consider if the use of an anonymous source followed the publication’s policy on granting anonymity to sources and if the use of an anonymous source affected the credibility of the author, the article, or the publication. Summarize your findings in one or two paragraphs.

Be Credible Copyright © 2018 by Kerry Benson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Home » Articles » Topic » Freedom of the Press issues and topics » Reporter’s Privilege

Reporter’s Privilege

Written by John O. Omachonu, published on November 14, 2023 , last updated on January 19, 2024

Reporter Earl Caldwell of the New York Times, left, was involved in a case that went to the Supreme Court concerning whether a reporter's privilege existed to protect journalists from being forced by the government to reveal information that they learned in reporting. The FBI tried to get him to reveal information he learned through his reporting on the Black Panthers. The Supreme Court in a narrow decision in Branzburg v. Hayes refused to recognize such a reporter's privilege based on the First Amendment. This photo of Caldwell, talking with syndicated columnist James Kilpatrick was taken in 1973 prior to Caldwell delivering testimony before a U.S. Senate subcommittee that was investigating freedom of the press. (AP Photo/Henry Griffin, used with permission from the Associated Press.)

The idea behind reporter’s privilege is that journalists have a limited First Amendment right not to be forced to reveal information or confidential news sources in court.

Journalists rely on  confidential sources  to write stories that deal with matters of legitimate public importance. Many reporters believe that the First Amendment provides them protection from testifying before a grand jury regarding their sources and prize their role as “neutral watchdogs and objective observers.” According to the  Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press , courts traditionally have supported the idea that individuals may refuse to testify when there is a determination that the interests of society outweigh the need for full disclosure of evidence.

In  Branzburg v. Hayes  (1972), the Supreme Court considered three consolidated cases determining whether there is a constitutionally based privilege in the First Amendment that permits reporters to refuse to testify before a grand jury.

In 1971 Paul Branzburg, a reporter for the Louisville Courier Journal, was called before a grand jury to testify about drug use in Kentucky after he had written two articles on the subject. In a second case, Paul Pappas, a reporter for a Massachusetts television station, was asked to tell a grand jury what he had seen and heard at a Black Panther office in 1970. In the third case, Earl Caldwell, a New York Times reporter who was African American and had gained the confidence of the Black Panthers in Oakland, California, was subpoenaed to appear before a grand jury investigating the activities of the group.

In split ruling, Court rejects constitutional privilege for reporters

In its ruling, the Court split three ways.

Justice  Byron R. White , in writing the Court’s opinion, was joined by three other justices who saw no First Amendment privilege for reporters called to testify before a grand jury. White, although acknowledging the protections of the First Amendment, did not find that Branzburg had been denied any of them.

According to White, “The use of confidential sources by the press is not forbidden or restricted… The sole issue before us is the obligation of reporters to respond to grand jury subpoenas as other citizens do and answer questions relevant to an investigation into the commission of a crime.”

Dissenters proposed a 3-pronged guideline on whether to protect confidential source

The four dissenters in the case were  William O. Douglas ,  Potter Stewart ,  William J. Brennan Jr. , and  Thurgood Marshall . Douglas saw the First Amendment as giving the press an “absolute and unqualified” First Amendment protection; the other three dissenters saw only a protection that is qualified, not absolute.

The dissenters proposed a three-pronged guideline to protect the identity of a confidential source.

• First, the government must show that there is probable cause that the reporter possesses information that is relevant to a specific violation of the law.
• Second, there is no alternative means for obtaining the information being sought.
• And, third, there is a “compelling and overriding” interest by the state in the information in question.

Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. rendered the fifth vote necessary for the high court to reject the notion of a constitutional privilege for reporters.

State shield laws are a statutory protection that gives journalists privilege against forced production of confidential or unpublished information. There is no federal shield law. In this photo, New York Times reporter Judith Miller, center, speaks at a panel discussion during a journalism conference in Las Vegas in 2005. Miller, who was jailed 85 days for refusing to reveal a source, defended her decision to go to jail to protect a source. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong, used with permission from the Associated Press)

Many states have recognized a reporter’s privilege

According to the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, state courts, state constitutions, and common law have generally exercised three options in this area.

First, many states have recognized a reporter’s privilege under state law. New York’s highest court, for example, has recognized a qualified privilege based on its state constitution — protecting both confidential and nonconfidential materials.

Second, in other states, a reporter’s privilege is based on common law. For example, the Supreme Court of Washington state recognized a qualified privilege in civil cases initially and later in criminal cases.

In a third option, courts in some states, among them New Mexico, can create their own rules of procedure.

Furthermore, in the absence of a court-recognized privilege, or applicable  shield law , journalists have successfully persuaded courts to quash subpoenas on the basis of generally applicable laws, including state rules of evidence.

Some states have enacted shield laws to protect a reporter’s source

Yet another option is a statutory protection that gives journalists privilege against forced production of confidential or unpublished information. Forty-nine states and the District of Columbia have enacted such statutes, called shield laws. These statutes tend to give more protection to reporters than does the federal Constitution or state constitutions. Shield laws have limitations, however. For example, in some states a reporter forfeits the privilege if he or she discloses a portion of the confidential matter in question. In a few states, shield laws are not applicable unless confidentiality is understood between a reporter and the source.

Efforts to pass a federal shield law continue today

In 2005, then- U.S. Rep. Mike Pence, R-Indiana, introduced the  Free Flow of Information Act . (Pence became vice president of the United States in 2017.) The goal of the bill is “to maintain the free flow of information to the public by providing conditions for the federally compelled disclosure of information by certain persons connected with the news media.” The House Judiciary Committee passed a later version of the bill in 2007.  However, the measure did not pass.

Pence and others introduced similar measures in 2009, 2011, and 2013.  In 2013, the measure passed the House, but the bill never made it to the Senate floor for a vote. 

In 2017, U.S. Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, and U.S. Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Maryland, renewed the  effort for a federal shield law  with a  new bill  with similar elements.

Justice Department policy limits ability to seize journalists’ records in leak investigations

After criticism over the U.S. Justice Department’s use of subpoenas and other investigative tools to gather information from or about journalists during leak investigations, the Justice Department in 2022  updated its guidelines on obtaining journalists’ records  to prohibit the use of such tools, with narrow exceptions. The policy prohibits the use of a compulsory legal process to gather information from or about a member of the news media who has “in the course of newsgathering, only received, possessed, or published government information, including classified information, or has established a means of receiving such information, including from an anonymous or confidential source.”

The policy shift came after it had come to light in 2021 that the Trump Justice Department had secretly seized the phone records of journalists with the Washington Post, The New York Times and CNN who had reported on federal investigations related to the 2016 presidential campaign.

Judge considers whether to hold reporter in contempt for refusing to reveal source

In 2023, a federal judge in Washington, D.C., weighed whether to hold in contempt a veteran journalist who has refused to identify her sources for stories about a Chinese-American scientist who was investigated by the FBI but never charged.

In that case,  Yanping Chen v. Federal Bureau of Investigation,   Chen, the scientist, alleges the government violated the Privacy Act is releasing documents about her.  After not being successful through discovery with the government to determine who leaked the documents, she subpoenaed the journalist, Catherine Herridge, and Fox News, Herridge's employer at the time.

In a ruling on Aug. 1, 2023 , the federal judge allowed Chen to depose Herridge as to the identity of her sources. Herridge refused to reveal her source or sources. As of Nov. 14, 2023, the judge had not ruled on whether to hold Herridge in contempt of court for not revealing her source.

This article first was published in 2009 and last updated in November 2023. The primary contributor was John Omachonu. It has been updated by other First Amendment Encyclopedia contributors.

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6 questions journalists should be able to answer before pitching a story

It’s important for reporters to be able to answer a handful of questions before pitching editors. here are questions for reporters and editors to ask..

I can’t believe that my former editor never threw me out of his office. That’s because, back when I was a cub reporter, I used to pitch story ideas by proclaiming that I wanted to write about “the homeless,” or “drug gangs,” or “teen mothers.”

While these were interesting and important topics, that’s all they were — topics. They didn’t have enough shape or specificity to be ideas.

Several months passed before I finally learned how important it was to do research to support a story idea. I realized I could do “pre-reporting” without getting too invested in a story. I could read previous stories and interview a few sources to have a better sense of what the story might be about.

And with that background, I could pitch my ideas in the form of a small quest: “The number of homeless families is increasing in the suburbs, and I’d like to find out why.” “Juries seem to be particularly unforgiving of drug gang members, and I’d like to see what prosecutors and defense attorneys have to say about that.” “A school has started a program for teen mothers, and I’d like to examine who’s behind it and what they hope to accomplish.”

Story pitches can come in all formats. (The narrative blog, Gangrey.com , has a good piece on pitches — particularly magazine story pitches — here .) Pitches can vary depending on the reporter’s track record, and how long the reporter and editor have worked together. In general, the more the editor and reporter have worked together, the more they can communicate in shorthand.

But regardless of the reporter’s experience or how mature the editor-reporter relationship is, I think it’s important for the reporter to be able to answer a handful of questions before pitching the story to his or her editor. These are questions for both reporters and editors to ask.

What piques your curiosity about the story?

I always ask this when a reporter approaches me with an idea. I want to know whether she is genuinely interested in the idea and whether her curiosity will drive her to seek the answers she needs to tell the story. I want to know what aspect of the story first caught her attention. If she ever gets lost in the weeds during the reporting, I can remind her about the initial moment of intrigue. Finally, I want to understand how the writer thinks. What topics are of natural interest to her? Where is she getting her ideas from? What is she reading?

What’s new about the story, and why do you want to tell it now?

I want the reporter to have done enough research to understand where the story lies in a timeline. What previous events have led to the current situation? Give me that context. Then let me know what’s new about the situation. Does the story reflect a new trend, a turning point, the start or the end of a conflict? Do we need to tell the story in advance of an upcoming decision, meeting or event?

Such “news pegs” can be limiting, and I’ve often argued that we should be able to publish stories just because they are good stories. But given how busy readers are and how many distractions they face, it helps if a story — even “just a good story” — has a compelling reason to be told today.

Why will the reader or viewer care about the story?

Yes, I’d like to know why a reporter is curious about a story idea. But I’d also like him to step outside of his reporter’s role and think as a reader or viewer. How can we frame the story in a way that’s relevant to the average person? This is where the reporter considers why the story would grab the attention of his parents or, say, his friends at a bar (or his parents at a bar).

Not that his parents or friends are average people, but they live outside the newsroom (which can sometimes become fixated on a story that’s not relevant to others). Ordinary people are most concerned about their finances, health and safety. And if they have kids, they’re probably concerned about all of that, plus education. Does the reporter’s story idea touch upon any of these issues?

How can we tell this story digitally?

We are increasingly telling our stories across platforms — on the Web and on tablets and other digital devices. It’s important for the reporter to develop a sharp sense of what kinds of storytelling work well on different platforms. In addition to producing the traditional story, could we create short videos of the people in the story for an online package? Are there any ways of telling the story through an interactive graphic that would work on the iPad?

I’m not expecting the reporter to produce these packages himself. But I’d like him to have the judgment to say, “Here are the components in my story idea that I think would lend themselves to digital storytelling.”

What questions will you need to ask to get this story, and what sources will you need to consult?

Since this is still the ideas phase, I’m not expecting the reporter to know what the story is going to say. I hope that he has a hypothesis that he’s going to test through his reporting. That’s why I’d like to know at least three or four questions that the reporter wants to ask, plus two or three sources he’ll consult. I’d also like to know whether there’s a central question that the reporter is trying to answer in the story. The central question can help us focus the story after he’s done most of his reporting.

How much time will you need to produce the story, and how much space/time do you think the story deserves?

As an editor, I think it’s important to talk about the scope of a story before much of the reporting gets under way. I don’t want to be rigid about it — we can increase or decrease the scope depending on what the reporter finds out. But it’s important for the reporter and editor to agree on the story’s ambitions at the beginning, and then adjust as the reporting progresses.

I’ve also found that it’s not a good idea to tell the reporter, “Write what you think the story deserves.” In the newspaper world, if a story deserves a lot of space, let’s talk about it ahead of time, and I will fight for that space. But both the reporter and the editor will benefit from having a starting point and shared expectations for how ambitious we both will be.

Opinion | Republican lawmaker crushes Tucker Carlson with surprisingly legitimate commentary

Texas Congressman Dan Crenshaw blasted the former Fox News host for being a ‘click-chaser’ in a capable rant on X.

Donald Trump said all legal scholars, ‘on both sides,’ wanted federal abortion law overturned. That’s wrong.

Roe v. Wade inspired legions of supporters and opponents. Before the 2022 ruling, numerous legal scholars urged the Supreme Court to uphold it.

Opinion | TV networks want Biden and Trump to debate. What’s the point?

Debates offer Americans a chance to see candidates answer tough questions, with journalistically sound pushback, about topics crucial to the country

AI is already reshaping newsrooms, AP study finds

Despite ethical concerns, nearly 70% of newsroom staffers recruited for an Associated Press survey say they’re using generative AI to create content

The International Fact-Checking Network’s statement on proposed legislation before the Georgian parliament

The IFCN supports press freedom for all fact-checkers, including FactCheck Georgia and Myth Detector

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OnRamps Rhetoric Research Guide

• Evaluate Sources
• OnRamps access to UT Library resources
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• Find Opinions, Editorials, and Viewpoints
• What is scholarly, peer reviewed?
• How to read a journal article
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• Find primary sources / archives
• Cite sources

Click on the tab for each term to view its definition.

• Credibility
• Peer Review
• Popular/Scholarly/Trade Publications

 Trustworthy, reliable.

Credible sources are generally understood to be accurate and reliable sources of information, free from unfair bias.  See the evaluation criteria below for help with determining credibility.

Inclination, leaning, prejudice, predisposition

A biased source is one in which the creator has a view of the issue at hand that had an effect on how they created the source. From the synonyms above, you can see that this can be to a small or large degree. Everyone has biases, and someone with a bias can still write a worthwhile source, but it is up to you to consider how much of a bias is present. Be aware of the biases inherent when an organization has a legislative agenda or is trying to sell something. 

Peer review is a process scholarly articles go through before they are published. Scholarly articles are sent to other experts in the field (peers) to ensure that they contain high-quality, original research important to the field. This is a measure of quality control other types of literature don't go through. 

If you can't tell whether or not a journal is peer-reviewed, check Ulrichsweb .

• access the database
• type in the title of the journal
• peer-reviewed journals will have a referee jersey ("refereed" is another term for "peer-reviewed") - example below

• Guide - Popular, Scholarly, or Trade? This guide will help you determine which category articles fall into, scholarly, popular, or trade.

Evaluation Criteria

Use the criteria below to help you evaluate a source.  As you do, remember:

• Each criterion should be considered in the context of your topic or information need. For example, currency changes if you are working on a current event vs. a historical topic.
• Weigh all four criteria when making your decision. For example, the information may appear accurate, but if the authority is suspect you may want to find a more authoritative site for your information.
• When in doubt about a source, talk about it with your professor or a librarian.

Criteria to consider:

• Currency : When was the information published or last updated? Is it current enough for your topic?
• Relevance : Is this the type of information you need (ex. a research study or scholarly article)? Is it related to your topic? Is it detailed enough to help you answer questions on your topic?
• Authority : Who is the author or creator of the information (can be an individual or an organization)? Are they an expert on your topic? Has the source been peer reviewed? Who is the publisher? Are they reputable?
• Accuracy : Is the information true? What information does the author cite or refer to?  Is this a research study with methods you can follow? Can you find this information anywhere else? Can you find evidence to back it up from another resource? Are studies mentioned but not cited (this would be something to check on)? Can you locate those studies?
• Purpose/perspective : What is the purpose of the information? Was it written to sell something or to convince you of something? Is this fact or opinion based? Is it unfairly biased?

Evaluate the news

Q: What do journalists and reporters do?

A: Journalism is a profession that is taught at universities. They are trained to gather, analyze and report information about current events to their audience. They are taught a professional code of ethics, including the principles of accuracy, independence, objectivity and fairness and respect for their subjects and audience.

• They may conduct interviews with those making decisions and those who are affected by those decisions.
• They may read a scholarly article and write about it for a non-expert audience who could be impacted.
• They may travel to locations, including war zones and scenes of violent unrest in order to offer an eyewitness account.
• They may investigate an issue through in depth interviews and analysis of troves of documents so as to bring the hidden to light.

Q: Sometimes I see quotations in an article that are obviously opinions. Does this mean I am reading a viewpoint source?

A: Make very sure that the viewpoints stated in an article are not coming from those whom the journalist is interviewing. Journalists interview stakeholders, typically on multiple sides of an issue, in order to show how people are impacted by a story.

Q: What role does a news source play in a democracy?

A: The news is essential to a functioning democracy because it speaks truth to power and holds those in power accountable to the public. Whether on a small town level, a national level or an international level, journalists provide a check on those in power who may be corrupt or who may obfuscate to deceive the public.

Q: Why do I hear that the news is biased, unfair or fake?

A: If you hear that a news source is biased, first ask yourself if the person calling the source biased has an agenda for calling into question a source's integrity.

Next, look into the source's author and audience. Is the writer a reporter/journalist, or is he a columnist or commentator? A columnist or commentator is not a journalist - it is someone who has a stated perspective and writes with that bias made apparent. They are employed by media sources in order to offer those opinions (this is what the Opinion / Editorial section of a news source is for). Some, but certainly not all, media sources choose to speak to a specific audience with shared values in order to attract subscribers or viewers and to keep advertisers.

Q: What do you mean by 'keep advertisers'?

A: The vast majority of our media is for profit. They rely on subscribers and advertising dollars. This is why many local news sources are in trouble - there are not enough subscribers to pay for a paper to function. The alternative is to be supported financially by the State - this would make holding those in power accountable tricky.

There are some news sources that are non-profit, but this is not an indication that they are not also keeping an audience in mind.

Q: I am overwhelmed by this - how can I know what to trust?

A: It is difficult. Use all of the critical thinking skills you have thus far learned in life in order to be a thoughtful, engaged and independent-minded citizen. Honing critical thinking skills is the most important work you can do.

Evaluate scholarly sources

Evaluating a scholar's work is challenging because we likely lack expertise in the research areas they are working in.

Therefore, it is most important to decide whether or not the source is relevant to our goals.

• Does the source provide evidence to support the claims I want to make?
• If applicable, is the population studied in the source relevant to the scope of my paper?
• Is the geography studied in the source relevant to the scope of my paper?
• Has something occurred in the area I am studying, such as an important event or technological change, that may make the source out of date for my paper?

This is a good moment to reach out to a teacher, classmate or friend to talk about the evidence you are using to support your claims. Is your evidence convincing? Research is isolating and it can help to talk it through with someone else, even if they are unfamiliar with your topic.

• Last Updated: Feb 8, 2024 9:07 AM
• URL: https://guides.lib.utexas.edu/onramps

How Alvin Bragg Hitched His Fate to Trump’s

The Manhattan D.A. campaigned as the best candidate to go after the former president. Now he finds himself leading Trump’s first prosecution — and perhaps the only one before the November election.

Credit... Philip Montgomery for The New York Times

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By Kim Barker ,  Jonah E. Bromwich and Michael Rothfeld

Kim Barker, Jonah E. Bromwich and Michael Rothfeld interviewed more than 70 of Alvin Bragg’s friends and colleagues and legal and political experts for this article. Rothfeld and Bromwich have written extensively about the case against Trump; Barker, an investigations reporter, examined Bragg’s legal record.

• April 9, 2024

Reporters vied for seats in the briefing room, some even crouching on the floor. They all knew, on this Tuesday in early April 2023, that Alvin L. Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, was about to announce something momentous: the first criminal charges against a former American president.

Listen to this article, read by Emily Woo Zeller

Open this article in the New York Times Audio app on iOS.

Yet when Bragg walked quietly onto the stage, it took a second or two for the audience to realize he was there. In his dark blue suit and dark-rimmed glasses, he blended into the dark blue curtains behind the lectern. He took out his notes and thanked everyone for coming. He was flanked by poster boards with flow charts, but that was as far as the showmanship went.

The accusations he went on to level against Donald J. Trump were salacious, involving money paid to a porn star just before the 2016 presidential election so she would remain silent about her claim that they had sex a decade before. But Bragg studiously avoided mentioning sex or hush money during the 13-minute event, focusing instead on 34 counts of falsifying business records to cover up the payment. Bragg looked frequently at his notes while he spoke, mostly in a monotone. He seemed unprepared (or unwilling) to answer the most obvious questions: why he had abandoned a different case, about whether Trump had falsified the valuations of properties, or why he thought he could make these new charges stick.

Bragg displayed passion only once, in response to a question about why he brought a hush-money case after his predecessor and federal prosecutors had not.

“This is the business capital of the world,” Bragg said, his voice rising. “We regularly do cases involving false business statements. The bedrock — in fact, the basis for business integrity and a well-functioning business marketplace — is true and accurate record-keeping. That’s the charge that’s brought here, falsifying New York State business records.”

True and accurate record-keeping. It’s hardly the stuff of history books. But a year later, it is this paperwork case — not the three other indictments that have dominated the news, involving accusations of trying to overturn a presidential election and mishandling highly classified documents — that will in the coming days make history as Trump’s first criminal trial, and perhaps the only one before the election in November.

Hardly anyone figured that it would play out this way. Bragg himself had said that “broader justice may warrant another case going first.” Yet with those other cases mired in legal skirmishing and delay, it is Bragg, a Harvard-trained prosecutor who has often appeared to be a most uncomfortable, un-media-savvy public figure, who will now face off against the reality-television star turned Republican former president, master of spin, media-ready insult and creation of his own narrative.

Bragg’s legal argument is complicated, but it stems from a simple episode: In the days before the 2016 election, Trump’s personal attorney and fixer, Michael D. Cohen, paid $130,000 in hush money to the adult-film star Stormy Daniels. Prosecutors argue that Trump, who denies that he had sex with Daniels, then lied on 34 business records — 12 ledger entries, 11 invoices and 11 checks — to disguise his repayment of Cohen as legal fees.

On its own, falsifying those documents would be misdemeanors, relatively minor crimes. Bragg elevated each of the charges to felonies by arguing that they were committed to hide or further another crime — which, in an unusual move, he did not charge. He said he wasn’t required to specify that crime, but added that it might have been a violation of state or federal election law. What may further complicate the case is that it relies heavily on testimony from Cohen, a disbarred lawyer who served prison time after pleading guilty to violating campaign-finance laws, evading taxes, making false statements to a bank and lying to Congress.

After the indictment, a chorus of critics — some but not all on the right — questioned the legal reasoning, wisdom and winnability of the hush-money case. Today, many experts believe that Bragg’s legal strategy looks considerably stronger, validated by a federal judge who rebuffed Trump’s effort to delay or even kill the case by having it moved to federal court, and by the Manhattan judge presiding over the case, who in February officially greenlit Bragg’s premise by setting a trial date.

None of which means the case has ceased to be controversial. The furor lives on, primarily in the political space. Trump and his allies have branded the case a witch hunt, a selective prosecution brought by a Democratic district attorney in the pocket of George Soros, boogeyman of the right. Many Democrats, in turn, worry that Trump’s narrative of persecution is only fueling his presidential campaign, especially because this case of sexual peccadillo and faked paperwork might look frivolous next to his three other indictments, which cut closer to his presidency and the foundations of American democracy.

“We’re all kind of like, ‘I can’t believe Alvin is at the center of this,’” says Erin E. Murphy, a New York University law professor who is part of Bragg’s close-knit friend group from law school and was one of more than 70 friends, colleagues and legal and political experts interviewed for this article. She adds: “He’s just so not political. He’s like, not a hyperpartisan political person in any way, shape or form. So there’s just this dissonance.”

Certainly, Bragg, who is 50, has never seemed to concern himself much with appearances. His friends have long joked about his wearing rumpled suits or a Boy Scout outfit on a date. If he could have applied for this job instead of campaigning for it, they say, he would have. That’s what he did when he became a federal prosecutor and then a deputy New York attorney general, each move a step forward in a life devoted to a careful, verging on nerdy, practice of the law; to the commitment to service — a word he has often used — that his parents instilled in him when he was growing up on Strivers’ Row in Harlem.

Bragg himself has seemed almost sheepish about the Trump case, preferring to talk about tackling wage theft or creating a jail-diversion program. Just after he announced the indictment last spring, his office sent out its regular roundup of big cases. It listed the Trump indictment not first, not even second, but third — after the convictions of two killers. The office’s 2023 highlights list didn’t even mention Trump. Bragg declined to comment for this article, concerned about being accused of unethical behavior before the trial.

Yet if Bragg the district attorney has been largely quiet about the former president, a look back through his record shows that hasn’t always been the case. Bragg the candidate, in fact, was more than willing to talk up his legal bona fides in the matter of Trump. Bragg may lack the polish and presentation of a politician. His friends may insist that he’s not a politician. But for all his lawyerly reticence, inside his sometimes-ill-fitting suits is a man of unmistakable ambition who has hitched his aspirations to the pursuit of Donald J. Trump.

Bragg’s emergence as a public critic of Trump came at a time when he was relatively unknown outside New York legal and Harvard-alumni circles. And it came in an unusual venue: a video, posted in May 2019 by the progressive news outlet NowThis and hosted by the flamboyantly public Trump hater Robert De Niro. In the video, Bragg and 10 other former federal prosecutors said they believed that Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election had uncovered more than enough evidence to indict Trump. “This isn’t even a close case,” Bragg said.

Bragg was on a break from public service, teaching at New York Law School. But he was also just weeks from announcing his next move: his candidacy for Manhattan district attorney in an election still two years away.

The incumbent district attorney, Cyrus Vance Jr., had begun his own investigation of the president and his businesses. And even before Vance announced in March 2021 that he would not seek re-election, the race had become a referendum on who could best take on Trump. In a primary campaign of would-be Trump slayers, Bragg sold himself as the most experienced.

He talked about supervising the state investigation into the Trump Foundation as chief deputy attorney general in 2017 — a case that led to the charity’s closure. He said he knew how to prosecute fraud in the valuation of properties, one strand of Vance’s Trump investigation. Referring to Trump’s “criminal policies,” Bragg added, “He has embraced white nationalism, misconstrued data and engaged in cronyism, and the result has been a parade of horribles.” Bragg told The Wall Street Journal that he “certainly” had more experience with Trump “than most people in the world.” A rival Democrat’s spokeswoman complained that Bragg attacked Trump “for political advantage every chance he gets.”

Bragg also used Trump to contrast himself with Vance. The district attorney, he argued, had appeared soft on the rich and powerful, declining to prosecute two of Trump’s children several years earlier on accusations that they misled potential buyers in the struggling Trump SoHo condo-hotel. Vance had also met with one of Trump’s lawyers, Marc Kasowitz, and accepted his $32,000 campaign contribution just months after rejecting the Trump SoHo case. (Vance later returned the money.)

For Bragg, this was a break with lawyerly protocol — to be talking about a potential case before seeing all the facts, at the risk of appearing biased. Yet in this election cycle, and especially with Trump newly vulnerable after his 2020 loss, holding him to account seemed vital to being elected in Manhattan.

Bragg’s campaign was hardly all Trump. He also championed the sort of criminal-justice-reform issues — for example, ending long prison sentences for low-level street crimes — that had helped progressive prosecutors sweep into office nationwide. But he seemed to double down on Trump as the campaign went on, simplifying and exaggerating his record. “It is a fact that I have sued Trump over 100 times,” Bragg told The New York Times in April 2021, an often-repeated claim that would be published everywhere from CNN to the BBC. “I can’t change that fact, nor would I. That was important work.” Asked recently for documentation, a campaign spokesman, Richard Fife, sent links to more than 100 news releases. A review of these and court filings found 30 cases in which the New York attorney general’s office had sued Trump or his federal agencies during Bragg’s time there — nearly always alongside other states. (The office also joined 12 other ongoing lawsuits against the Trump administration, the analysis found.) As a top aide to the attorney general, Bragg could have supervised those cases, but taking personal credit seems a bit of a stretch.

The district attorney’s office referred questions about the lawsuits to Fife, who said Bragg’s comments were not written but made “in conversation.” (Bragg, in fact, did repeat the statement in a written candidate questionnaire.) “I will concede,” Fife said, “that our use of the word ‘suit’ isn’t as limited as your definition.”

In heavily Democratic Manhattan, primaries typically function as general elections. On Primary Day in June 2021, Bragg said on Twitter: “As Chief Deputy Attorney General of NY State, I oversaw a staff of 1200+ people delivering progressive change. I led the investigation into stop and frisk. I didn’t just sue Donald Trump and the Trump Foundation — I won.”

On Nov. 2, 2021, the night he trounced his Republican opponent, Bragg moved to the microphone at Harlem Tavern as supporters chanted: “Alvin! Alvin! Alvin!” His first public remarks were hardly memorable.

“Somewhere deep down inside, I think I always wanted a bar mitzvah,” said Bragg, who had long taught Sunday school at the nearby Abyssinian Baptist Church. “This is new for me, newly elected — I think I can say that now, right?” he asked the crowd, starting his speech. Then he paused, practically giddy, to interrupt himself: “Look, this is phenomenal.”

Bragg’s remarks made it clear that he saw his election as Manhattan’s first Black district attorney as the natural next chapter in the annals of his life. Walking to the tavern on Frederick Douglass Boulevard, Bragg told his supporters, his mind flipped back through a personal journey that began along this stretch of what neighborhood old-timers like himself still called Eighth Avenue: being dropped off at grade school by his parents; eventually taking the M10 bus there on his own; facing guns pointed at him by the police; graduating from high school. But that was not all. Bragg had one more memory to share.

“I had my first date with Jamila Ponton Bragg on 139th Street and Eighth Avenue,” he said. “And I was wearing a Boy Scout uniform, because I had just come from leading a troop at Abyssinian Baptist Church, and she still ate with me, and she married me!”

Bragg’s parents, Alvin Sr. and Sadie, raised him to move seamlessly between worlds. They attended church at Abyssinian, a stronghold of Black social-justice activism. But they also enrolled their only child as a kindergartner at the Trinity School, one of the city’s most exclusive private academies. Bragg, one of a handful of Black students, became the center of a tight-knit group of Trinity kids, friends who are still in his inner circle. “We always called him the mayor,” recalls John Scott, who met Bragg in middle school. “He was like the most gregarious and outgoing and charismatic guy, even back then.”

In a Trinity yearbook entry, Bragg quoted Aristotle, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the music producer Quincy Jones — and himself: “You and I are like two stalks of corn in a field of love … waiting for the harvest.” (It was apparently an inside joke.)

Asked by a journalist during the campaign if he was nerdy, Bragg said: “I think yes and no. I think nerdiness is a little bit context-based.” He paused and added: “I think in any broad sense, yes.” The Rev. Al Sharpton, who supported Bragg’s campaign and praised his indictment of Trump, described him this way: “He’s not the larger-than-life swagger figure of Harlem. He is the result of what those generations produced: a competent, efficient guy.”

Growing up, Bragg’s friends say, he didn’t make a big fuss about the three times he remembered the police pulling guns on him on the Harlem streets. Once, several police cars converged on a taxi carrying Bragg and four Black friends; the officers, guns drawn, ordered everyone out. They told them they “fit the description” of some boys who had just committed a crime nearby, then held them for a few minutes before letting them go, recalls Roald Richards, one of the friends. (During the campaign, whenever Bragg brought up his encounters with the police, he would also mention the three times criminals pulled guns on him or would praise the police for keeping the streets safe.)

Yet if Bragg swallowed those experiences as a teenager, he has also described them as fuel for his ambition. He was elected president of his high school senior class; his yearbook described an imaginary 20-year reunion in which Bragg was president of the United States. While he was at college, The Harvard Crimson highlighted his ability as president of the Black Students Association to defuse tension between warring student groups. The headline: “The Anointed One.” Bragg’s role: “Conciliator.” He became such good friends with Republicans that, years later, one would actually donate money to his campaign — despite the fact that said Republican, Harry Wilson, would later run for governor of New York. At Harvard Law School, Bragg joined the team that won the prestigious moot-court competition. Even that makes his path seem preordained: It was the Archibald Cox team, named for the Watergate prosecutor who investigated President Richard M. Nixon.

Bragg started out as a lawyer in private practice representing, among other clients, Native American tribal members who said they had been abused by the police. But he soon became a prosecutor at the state attorney general’s office, explaining later that he felt he could make more of a difference from the inside. After three years, he left to become a lawyer at the New York City Council. Three years after that, he joined the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan. After four years there, he returned for a second tour at the attorney general’s office. It became a pattern: Bragg never stayed long enough to build a deep record. He seemed in a rush to get somewhere.

But in offices where head-down self-advancement was the norm, Bragg amassed friends and allies. It’s all but impossible to find anyone who worked with him who has a negative thing to say. He walked around, often slightly disheveled, messenger bag dangling and tie askew, smiled big and asked, “How are you?” Several colleagues recalled being struck by how deliberately he tested the strengths and weaknesses of evidence. “In every regard, he was one of the smartest people I’ve ever met, and meticulous,” says Joshua Gradinger, who worked under Bragg in the attorney general’s office. “I say that over and over again — meticulous.”

But as Bragg prepared to take office in 2022, a conflict was brewing: between his careful approach to the law and the promises he made during his political campaign.

Within days of becoming district attorney, Bragg announced his top policy priorities. From the recesses of his campaign website, he pulled a criminal-justice-reform manifesto outlining crimes that would no longer be prosecuted, including marijuana possession, trespassing and sex work. The Day 1 Memo, as it was called, also signaled that illegal gun possession would not mean jail time unless the gun was used in a violent crime.

The timing was less than ideal. During the pandemic, murders and shootings rose, and many New Yorkers seemed to believe that things were spiraling out of control. “Happy 2022, Criminals!” The New York Post blared, referring to Bragg as the “woke new Manhattan DA.”

Bragg’s ideas weren’t exactly radical. But his execution — announcing them as one of his first acts, in the biggest job of his life, without anticipating the backlash — made him look like a rookie, like someone who didn’t seem to fully grasp that he would be upsetting some of the very people he needed to do his job. The police commissioner rebuked him; police unions condemned him. Preet Bharara, a former U.S. attorney who had hired Bragg and then campaigned for him, was disappointed and frustrated by what he saw as an astonishingly clumsy rollout, according to people familiar with his thinking.

Bragg had another hangover from the campaign: the case of Tracy McCarter, a nurse accused of killing her husband. Vance had charged McCarter with second-degree murder in September 2020, even though she claimed self-defense and domestic abuse. Activists on social media had defended her. Bragg had weighed in. “I #StandWithTracy,” he tweeted on the day she was charged, using the hashtag pushed by McCarter’s backers. “Prosecuting a domestic violence survivor who acted in self-defense is unjust.”

Now, invested with the powers of the district attorney, Bragg had to decide whether he would indeed stand with McCarter. Pressing him to do so was a progressive group, Color of Change, whose political-action committee had endorsed him and pledged to spend more than $1 million supporting his campaign. It ultimately spent about $425,000, money that helped Bragg overcome his closest opponent’s last-minute rush of cash. (That financial link would become Republican ammunition: Within days of its Bragg endorsement, Color of Change received a $1 million donation from George Soros, the billionaire patron of liberal causes. After the Trump indictment, the former president and his allies pointed to it as evidence that Bragg was under Soros’s control.)

In November 2022, Bragg went into court himself — unusual for a sitting district attorney — to ask the judge to dismiss the McCarter case. “I understand the gravity of this decision,” he said, before lapsing into a jumble of legalese. Several days later, the judge, Diane Kiesel, dismissed the case but excoriated Bragg for what she called legal errors and potentially politically motivated decisions. The case, she wrote, “has reached the point where the public could perceive this dismissal as bought and paid for with campaign contributions and political capital.”

But in some ways, Bragg had started to get his footing, delivering on some of his campaign promises to take on the powerful and help the less fortunate. He prosecuted hate crimes against Asian Americans, exonerated a sixth defendant in the 1989 Central Park jogger case and pursued significantly fewer lower-level crimes than Vance had. He charged Stephen K. Bannon, Trump’s former political strategist, with money laundering and conspiracy for his role in a charity that skimmed from donations for a border wall, a case that has yet to go to trial. Bragg would also obtain indictments of two men with ties to a fellow Democrat, Mayor Eric Adams.

Still, Bragg seemed to be trying to thread the needle, looking for compromise as he had throughout his career. While he stopped demanding bail as often as Vance had, those decisions were often dictated by state bail reforms. His office also filed about 3,800 violent-felony cases in 2022, the most in 10 years, even as shootings and murders dropped, allowing Bragg to claim that his policies were working. But none of this would stop conservatives from grumbling that Bragg was a left-wing coddler of violent criminals, as a Republican prosecutor in Arizona would later do when she refused to extradite a murder suspect to New York.

By the end of his first year in office, Bragg had turned a corner. He had just won his biggest victory: convicting Trump’s company of tax fraud. Vance had filed the charges, but Bragg delivered on them. And finally, he was finding the way forward with Trump himself.

For more than two years, Cyrus Vance’s prosecutors had hunted for a winnable case against Trump. But while it wasn’t hard to find legally questionable behavior across Trump’s business empire, each possible case had a flaw.

The lawyers were intrigued by the hush-money case. Mark Pomerantz, a former federal prosecutor Vance had pulled out of retirement to pursue Trump, was among those who called it “the zombie case,” because it was alive, then dead, then alive again. Pomerantz thought the hush-money facts seemed incriminating, easy to explain to a jury. But he worried about persuading a judge that the misdemeanor charges of falsifying business records — for disguising the hush-money repayment as legal fees — could be elevated to felonies.

Pomerantz, who had led the criminal division in the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan, was drawn to another option: Trump’s exaggerations of his net worth on financial statements submitted to banks. Trump wasn’t just boasting, Pomerantz argued. He was committing crimes.

Weeks before his term ended in December 2021, Vance brought together a group of experienced lawyers to evaluate the net-worth case. The group included two prosecutors who worked on the Mueller investigation, but it did not include the incoming district attorney; Bragg was not even told about the meeting. Regardless, Vance emerged with a plan. He would push ahead.

When Bragg took office that January, he needed to decide quickly whether to sign on to the case; prosecutors were already presenting evidence to a grand jury. But quickly wasn’t in Bragg’s nature. By month’s end, a frustrated Pomerantz sent Bragg an email that he would later write was “blunt, perhaps too blunt.” He told the new district attorney that he needed to “respect our judgment,” noted that it was “virtually impossible” to meet with him about the Trump case and scolded Bragg, who was two decades younger, for looking at his phone during one of their few meetings. Pomerantz later wrote that he had wondered if Bragg “was in over his head.”

But Bragg remained skeptical, according to people familiar with his thinking. He believed that there was no evidence tying Trump directly to a financial fraud; without it, he worried, he would not be able to prove Trump’s criminal intent. And prosecutors wanted a tour guide — a cooperating witness who knew the ins and outs of the crime. Michael Cohen was extremely willing, having broken with Trump, but he lacked intimate knowledge of the Trump Organization’s finances.

There were more meetings, more emails — but Bragg refused to bring the case on Pomerantz’s timeline. So in late February, Pomerantz and another lead prosecutor on the case quit — in spectacular fashion. Pomerantz’s resignation letter described Bragg’s decision as “a grave failure of justice.” He then wrote a book called “People vs. Donald Trump” that might as well have been called “Pomerantz vs. Bragg.” Pomerantz wrote that the investigation turned into “the legal equivalent of a plane crash” and accused Bragg of “pilot error.”

Bragg, for his part, said little — even when Pomerantz’s resignation letter became public, even when many of his liberal supporters complained that he had dropped the ball on Trump and even when critics lumped this decision together with the Day 1 Memo as some kind of proof that he wasn’t up to the job. For all of Bragg’s campaign rhetoric, those who know him insisted that he would never have indicted Trump without reviewing every piece of evidence. Plus, Bragg did not feel bound by Vance’s view of the case — he was the district attorney now.

“He doesn’t get the luxury of saying, ‘Well, Cy Vance said it’s OK,’” says Kim Foxx, a Bragg friend who is the state’s attorney in Chicago. “His name is on the door. His face is on the wall. He owes it to the case. He owes it to the potential defendant to do his due diligence.”

To the world, it might have looked as if the Trump case were dead. Bragg was no longer talking about Trump publicly. But he and three top aides had begun meeting regularly on the eighth floor of the district attorney’s office, going back through all the documents from the net-worth case. The Trump Organization’s chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg, had already been indicted in the tax-fraud case; now he might be persuaded to plead guilty and cooperate against Trump in this one. And he might, perhaps, become a witness about another matter: the hush-money payment to Stormy Daniels.

Bragg kept returning to that payment. This case had a far cleaner narrative than the net-worth case, with clear evidence of Trump’s involvement; he had personally signed nine checks repaying Cohen. And Cohen was the perfect tour guide: He had paid Daniels in the first place. By the summer of 2022, Bragg was confident that he could convince a court that these misdemeanors should be elevated to felonies. He added prosecutors to the Trump team. The “zombie case” was alive.

A payoff to a porn star might seem like a trivial matter on which to hinge a historic prosecution of a man who later tried to overturn an election. But in late February, the Supreme Court further delayed the federal prosecution of Trump on charges of plotting to do just that, agreeing to decide whether he has immunity for acts taken as president. Trial dates for the other two cases — the federal classified-documents case in Florida and the state election-interference case in Georgia — seem at best months away.

So the hush-money case it is. Some legal experts initially deemed it shaky, largely because Bragg failed to specify the underlying crime that Trump intended to commit. Though the crime of falsifying business records is nominally a misdemeanor, the Manhattan district attorney’s office almost always charges it as a felony. Still, the Trump case stands apart. The Times could identify only two other felony cases in Manhattan over the past decade in which defendants were indicted on charges of falsifying business records but no other crime.

In an opinion piece in The Times soon after the Trump indictment, Jed Shugerman, a law professor at Boston University, called the case a “disaster” and a “legal embarrassment.” Some lawyers predicted that it would be kicked up to federal court and buried in delays, largely because it was related to a federal-election campaign. Some wondered how internal records could prove intent to defraud.

But in the following months, Bragg beat back legal challenges. He detailed the crimes that Trump was trying to conceal — violations of state and federal election law and state tax law. When Trump’s lawyers tried to move the case to federal court, the judge there, Alvin K. Hellerstein, rebuffed them, saying that the fact that the alleged fraud happened in a federal election was “not a basis” to move the case. Then the New York judge overseeing the case, Juan M. Merchan, ruled that Bragg’s prosecutors had presented “legally sufficient evidence” for the grand jury to reasonably find that Trump intended to defraud voters and the government. Some initial skeptics have come around, even if they believe that the legal questions surrounding the case will probably re-emerge in appeals.

Accounting for the weight of the moment, Bragg has increasingly cast the case as an attempt to subvert the 2016 presidential election. “The case is not — the core of it’s not — money for sex,” Bragg said in a radio interview in December. “We would say it’s about conspiring to corrupt a presidential election and then lying in New York business records to cover it up.”

Trump heads into the trial after a series of setbacks, both legal and financial. Relying on some of the same evidence that was pursued by Pomerantz, the New York attorney general, Letitia James, recently won a $454 million civil judgment against Trump for fraudulently inflating his net worth. He also owes an $83 million defamation award to the writer E. Jean Carroll. And in his pretrial rulings, Merchan has slapped Trump with a gag order and strictly circumscribed the arguments his lawyers will be allowed to make. Defense lawyers have signaled that their case will most likely focus on attacking Michael Cohen as a serial liar who cannot be trusted and arguing that prosecutors have little evidence of Trump’s intent to commit a crime.

If Trump is convicted, he faces limited personal jeopardy, at least in the near term; any penalty — a maximum of four years in prison — would probably be deferred by his almost-certain appeal. The far-larger questions as the trial and the Trump-Biden rematch converge are about political jeopardy, or political advantage. Republican strategists believe, and some of their Democratic counterparts fret, that an acquittal or a hung jury will energize Trump, while he could more convincingly write off a conviction than with the other cases. “I can’t imagine anything easier to paint as a partisan witch hunt,” says Whit Ayres, a veteran Republican pollster.

Even so, some Democrats argue that wall-to-wall coverage of the trial will remind voters on the fence — like the moderate Republicans Trump needs to win — that he has been accused of having sex with a porn star while his wife cared for their infant son and then covering it up to win a presidential election. “The world’s going to stop for this,” says James Carville, the longtime Democratic strategist. “I mean, the first criminal trial ever of a president? I think if anything, the significance of this event is not yet fully appreciated.”

On the morning of Feb. 15, Bragg was back in the dingy courtroom where Trump was first arraigned. The district attorney, this time wearing a well-fitted gray suit, sat on a hard wooden bench in the second row, behind the team of prosecutors he had assembled. Walkie-talkies crackled, signaling the arrival of the former president. In a dirty hallway crammed with Secret Service agents, Trump spoke to television cameras. He said his lawyers would ask to delay the case — then he walked in, wearing a slightly rumpled navy suit and a screaming red tie.

In the courtroom, an unusually subdued Trump stared at the ceiling, arms at his sides. But once the trial date was set, Bragg didn’t seem to focus on Trump or on discussions about jury selection and trial exhibits. He bent over the judge’s decision declining to dismiss the case, reading it slowly, carefully. After the hearing, he released a brief statement, pronouncing himself “pleased.” Pleased . His spokeswoman confessed later that it was a struggle to get him to say even that.

Susan Beachy and Julie Tate contributed research.

Read by Emily Woo Zeller

Narration produced by Emma Kehlbeck and Krish Seenivasan

Engineered by David Mason

Kim Barker is a Times reporter writing in-depth stories about national issues. More about Kim Barker

Jonah E. Bromwich covers criminal justice in New York, with a focus on the Manhattan district attorney's office, state criminal courts in Manhattan and New York City's jails. More about Jonah E. Bromwich

Michael Rothfeld is an investigative reporter in New York, writing in-depth stories focused on the city’s government, business and personalities. More about Michael Rothfeld

Our Coverage of the Trump Hush-Money Case

The manhattan district attorney has filed charges against former president donald trump over a hush-money payment to a porn star on the eve of the 2016 election..

Taking the Case to Trial: Trump is all but certain to become the first former U.S. president to stand trial on criminal charges after a judge denied his effort to delay the proceeding and confirmed it will begin on April 15 .

Implications for Trump: As the case goes to trial, the former president’s inner circle sees a silver lining in the timing. But Trump wouldn’t be able to pardon himself  should he become president again as he could if found guilty in the federal cases against him.

Michael Cohen: Trump’s former fixer was not an essential witness in the former president’s civil fraud trial in New York  that concluded in January. But he will be when he takes the stand in the hush-money case .

Stormy Daniels: The chain of events flowing from a 2006 encounter that the adult film star said she had with Trump has led to the brink of a historic trial. Here's a look inside the hush-money payout .

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