Saturday, May 3, 2008
So this semester I wrote a story about a TB scare on campus. My source , who still wishes to be anonymous, told me that the student was international, male and lived in a SLU. My source wished not be mentioned in the article, so I approached Simon Brown, moderator of the international house who told me that the he knew the student personally and that he was a member of the SLU community. I essentially went somewhere else to get information I already knew, and I used Simon as my number one source. How would you have used the information from the anonymous source? Here's a link to my article: http://transcript.owu.edu/pdfs/archives/20080214.pdf
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I would have done what you did -- corrobrate information given from an anonymous source with on-the-record sourcing. Multiple on-the-record sources are preferred and only strengthen the original tip. Anonymous sources are the exception not the rule in journalism. In my career, I often received background tips such as "I have heard thus and such . . . you ought to check it out," from my confidential sources on my various beats.I then would try to corroborate the tips on the record, never revealing my sources. Once you burn a source, you burn your credibility as a journalist. Once your anonymous sources have confidence in your credibility to keep sources and methods out of the public domain, they will more apt to share addtional information. But the key is to keep your sources' identities confidential in your reporting. It is best to use them as deep background.
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