Developing Sources – How to Create Your Own Network of Tipsters and Snitches
By Andrew Wellner
David Donald
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Everyone knows that journalists are only as good as their sources, but few reporters realize that their sources are only as good as they make them.
David Donald, training director of the Investigative Reporters and Editors and the National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting, explained to seminar participants that investigative journalists need to have strong interviewing skills, including the ability to plan an interview and a strong command of effective interviewing tactics.
Reporters should write down their questions, pick a phrase or inquiry to use as a means to open discussion and gather documents to show to interviewees long before showing up to an interview, he said.
Donald encouraged reporters to do “inner interviews,” going over their questions how they expect things to go before they conduct the real interview.
Some things may not pan out, he said, the opener may fall short or the interview might not go as scripted, so one of the most important things for a journalist to remember, is to remain flexible.
Donald said that interviews should begin soft, with easy questions and only gradually transition to tougher questions. “Start with their biography, hobbies, interests,” Donald said.
Donald staked out what he described as a “sort of extreme position” regarding off-the-record information. Sources “cannot go unilaterally off the record. You have to grant it,” he said, urging the audience to keep in mind that information left off the record does not help a journalist’s readers or viewers. Public officials should never be allowed off the record, Donald said, because they should know how the system works.
If a subject wants to go off the record, Donald said a journalist should make clear that they will return and negotiate to try and get statements on the record. This is often a process of negotiation, trying to get a source’s name attached to one statement or another with the goal of getting as much of the interview on the record as possible. In such situations, Donald advocates starting out with a negotiation over the more innocuous parts of the interview, biography, chronology, et cetera, before trying to talk the source into attaching his or her name to potentially damaging statements.
Some sources have people or groups of people, press agents or public relations firms, whose job is to grant or deny interviews. To get past such gatekeepers, Donald tells them, “this is a big story, this is something your boss is going to want to talk to me about. And if you don’t think so I think you’re wrong.” If that fails, he falls back on what he calls “The American Way approach,” wherein he tries to convince the person standing between him and a source that the freedom of press is vital to democracy and that, “this is how our system works.”
One thing Donald does not advocate is telling a press agent, public relations practitioner, secretary or aide just how much information he has regarding whatever malfeasance is at issue.
“You need to be stealthy with the people who are the gatekeepers to your source,” he said because you don’t know how they may share that information. Once he is face-to-face with his interviewee, Donald said he will share information and be honest about what he knows and how he knows it.
When an interview is still confined to innocuous, soft-ball questions, Donald advocates stepping in and filling gaps in the conversation. But once the questions get tough, journalists should not be afraid of silence.
“Silence is golden,” he said, because the subject will likely be as unnerved by awkward gaps in the conversation as the interviewer, and that can lead them to offer more information to break the silence.
In a panel discussion at the end of Donald’s talk, Mike Mansur of the Kansas City Star said he was an advocate of cultivating “activist gadflies who may seem a little bit wacky,” because they often lead reporters to great stories.
Ron Nixon of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune agreed, noting one of his best sources would fit the activist gadfly mold. “Even though he’s probably nuts, that doesn’t mean he’s wrong.”
Holly Heyser of the Orange County Register pointed out that, although many calls to her newspaper come from “wack-a-loons,” often these seemingly crazy people have “been driven crazy by fighting the system.”
One of the best ways of handling these sources, who can eat up a lot of a journalist’s time, is to ask them to prove their allegations by bringing in documents or other forms of proof. Most of the time the source never comes through, she said, but sometimes you hit the jackpot and they show up with boxes full of documents.
If a source has stolen documents, Nixon said “as long as you didn’t call this person and say ‘go break into this house’,” you are not liable as far as the law is concerned. However, Nixon warned, he often finds himself debating the ethics whether using documents that may have been stolen is worth the good that could be done by using them in a story.
Nixon said to avoid getting too close to your sources, because that can lead to situations where journalists are willing to soften a story out of sympathy to a source that has become a friend. Heyser recalled how she would hang out with legislators while working at the Virginia state capital. She said she would let potential interviewees know that just because they were hanging out that night, “this doesn’t mean I won’t be ready to pull the trigger on you tomorrow.”
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