Smart Sourcing

By John Emshwiller
November 3, 2008 05:05 PM

“Print that and I’ll sue you!”

The phone line then went dead. Such encounters remind us of the importance of vigilantly caring for and feeding good sources, the ones reporters want to keep for a long period of time. They are the knowledgeable insiders who possess important information, and they are willing to share it with you (and, in the best of all worlds, with no other reporters). Such sources can be hard to find, and a challenge to keep.

While it’s pleasant to think that every source is motivated by the desire to see good triumph, the reality is that almost every source is motivated, at least in part, by drives that will never make a “Ten Greatest Virtues” list. More than a few want information or favors back from you, the reporter – all of which can make newsgathering more complicated than just vacuuming up dirt.

Every reporter, of course, has to find his or her own comfort zone when it comes to dealing with such sources. Sometimes colleagues who respect each other can disagree. This occurred when Rebecca Smith, a fellow reporter at The Wall Street Journal, and I were working together to cover the Enron scandal.

Following Enron’s December 2001 bankruptcy filing, Rebecca and I each received calls from the same investigator, who was working on one of the many government probes of Enron. Just at the beginning of his investigation, he freely admitted that he understood little of Enron’s sometimes dazzlingly complex finances. Reading our Journal stories, this person figured we knew more about Enron than he did. He asked for our help to better understand the company – with the prospect that he might be able to help us down the road.

Rebecca was cool to the overture. As she later explained, she didn’t feel comfortable feeding information to a government official in an investigation that could lead to criminal prosecutions, as Enron eventually did. Such a chain of events could then result in the reporter being called as a witness at a trial. By taking that path, she believed, it was too easy for reporters to become tools of the government rather than independent watchdogs of that government.

I agreed that there has to be a clear dividing line between government and the press. However, I was more willing than her to make exceptions to that general rule. My experience had left me with the belief that relationships with sources, especially ones you hope to have for a longtime, involve a certain amount of give and take – including, sometimes, trading information. I’m especially attracted to such relationships with people who can subpoena documents and witnesses.

I try to follow a few rules in such relationships: Never give up information that should first go into the paper. Never give any information that could identify an unnamed source. And, of course, always try to get more than you give.

I decided to help out the government investigator. In the end, he asked for surprisingly little. He seemed quite satisfied with getting some help to better understand material that had already been in our stories or was otherwise on the public record, such as in Enron SEC filings.

Over time, the source returned the favor with a small bonanza of scoops. He provided us an internal Enron document that contained new key information about one of the most suspicious – and ultimately destructive – of Enron’s off-balance-sheet entities. Thanks to him, the Journal was the first to obtain transcripts of interviews with top company officials from an internal Enron investigation started during the company’s collapse.

For me, developing long-term sourcing relationships often involves a lot of idle chatter that can run far afield, from baseball to bad movies. Partly, I do this out of the belief that the best source is someone who views you as his or her friend. Plus, I like talking to people, sometimes too much. I have wasted more than a few hours in this pursuit over the years.

One of the trickier issues in dealing with good sources is the checking back of quotes. The classic argument against this practice is that it gives sources a chance to recant. That’s a legitimate worry.

However, I’ve found that checking quotes can be a very good excuse for talking to a source a second time and working to get additional information. It’s also a courtesy that really good sources appreciate. And sometimes, it keeps errors from getting into the paper.

The guy who shouted his lawsuit threat at me had been a good source on a variety of stories for a number of years. He was well-connected and involved in lots of different things. He wasn’t always easy to reach and tended to speak rapidly and in tantalizingly cryptic terms. But, he could also be a gold mine of information. Calling him back to check quotes had been both a good relationship-building tool and a good way to mine for additional information — not to mention ensuring that I understood him correctly in the first place.

The blow-up came on a story in which he had some direct involvement, and therefore, he was particularly sensitive to what was being written. When I called him back, he’d obviously been thinking about what he’d previously said and seemingly wanted to backtrack on a couple of important points – ones that I was pretty certain I’d heard correctly. He insisted that I had misunderstood him. I begged to differ. The dialogue went back and forth, getting testier until the blow up.

After he hung up the phone, I thought things over and made a couple of small modifications, thinking that I might have misunderstood certain details in the initial conversation. But I kept in what I’d thought was the guts of what he’d said.

While we still have occasional contact, our relationship hasn’t been quite the same since. I sometimes wonder if I should have been more flexible. But, I figure sometimes you have to be wiling to risk alienating even a good source.

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Copyright © 2008 Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism