Last week we had the opportunity to participate in a symposium honoring Phil Meyer, Knight Chair of Journalism at the University of North Carolina-Chapel. About 30 journalism educators, practitioners and former students of Phil's spent the better part of two days kicking hard on the topic ""Raising the Ante: The Internet's Impact on Journalism Education and Existing Theories of Mass Communication."

Kathleen Frankovic, director of surveys for CBS News, used the symposium as the basis for her column last week at cbsnews.com. The column (not quite a blog) is called “Poll Positions” (about public opinion, polls and the process of conducting and reporting them). Here is her column's link: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/04/02/opinion/pollpositions/main3988828.shtml

Kathy's column makes reference to something we wrote on the topic of the future of polling. That short paper, but with all of its hyperlinks, can be found at "Are We Researching How To Do Research?"

On Thursday night Phil gave a short speech at a dinner attended by the participants and his family. In "Something strange and possibly dangerous," he highlighted that change is not coming, it is here, and that all of us have to change out thinking and practices if democracy is to survive.

"We need to turn our conversation toward an economic theory of journalism. We need to apply existing theory to understanding the processes and effects of the new media. We need to learn how to sell enlightened understanding to the public so that it can preserve its democratic values. The synergy of mass media and mass production is gone, probably forever. Something strange – and possibly dangerous — is taking its place."

Strange and dangerous and something most exciting.

It can. 

The NYT this morning tells us that "Big News Media Join in Push to Limit Use of Unidentified Sources."  Readers are told:

"Concerned that they may have become too free in granting anonymity to sources, news organizations including USA Today, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, NBC News and The New York Times are trying to throttle back their use.
     "But some journalists worry that these efforts could hamper them from doing their jobs - coming in a hothouse atmosphere where mistrust of the news media is rampant, hordes of newly minted media critics attack every misstep on the Web, and legal cases jeopardize their ability to keep unnamed news sources confidential....
     "Last year, The New York Times adopted a more stringent approach to its treatment of confidential sources, including a provision that the identity of every unidentified source must be known to at least one editor. A committee of the paper's journalists recently recommended that the top editors put in place new editing mechanisms to ensure that current policies are enforced more fully and energetically."

We look forward to these "new editing mechanisms."

Yes, policies on unnamed sources should be made, those policies should be clear and everyone in the newsroom should know what they are.  But more often (as in "every day"), editors must know the sources -- indeed, all sources -- are for a story, how to reach those souces and how to verify what the reporter wrote, even if the reporter is out-of-pocket. 

This is not difficult if journalists recognize that a PC-based word processing application already has the tools to assist in this "Who Are The Sources" mission. (If the publication is still using something like the old Coyote terminals, sorry, we probably can't help  you.) 

The tool is the "comment" function in the word processor.  While the newsroom is making policies about sourcing, add this one: "Every paragraph of every story will end with an embedded comment.  That comment will show editors exactly how the reporter knows what he or she just wrote."  The comment might include a source's name, phone number and date-time-place of interview.  The comment might include a URL or a bibliographic citation.  It might include reference to the specific reporter's notebook.  But in the end, the comments should be sufficient that an editor can "walk the cat backward" to determine exactly how the reporter knows what he/she just wrote.  Doing so helps prevent unwarranted assumptions and errors of fact, if not interpretation.

There will be those of the Burn-Your-Notes School of libel defense who will contend this is comment thing is suicidal.  We would suggest, first, that very few stories ever become court cases.  Secondly remember that truth is the first defense in libel actions, and it is our responsibility to deliver that truth.

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Today's NYT "Week in Review" carries Daniel Okrent's column, "The Public Editor."  This week's solid piece -- "Briefers and Leakers and the Newspapers Who Enable Them" -- takes another deserved shot at the use of unattributed and/or anonymous sourcing.  But both Okrent and the NYT fall short in providing adequate transparency and leveraging of the digital environment to the benefit of both readers and the newspaper.

Okrent reports on some analytic work regarding the NYT's use of sourcing practices, work carried out by a grad student at NYU, Jason B. Williams.  Okrent gives appropriate attribution to Williams and his data and, let's assume, reported it correctly.  But he only reported the data.  At the end of the essay, Okrent quotes NYT editor Bill Keller: "'We need to get our policies [regarding sourcing] hard-wired into the brains of our reporters and editors that we are obliged to tell readers how we know what we know,' Bill Keller told me the other day." [The IAJ's emphasis added.]

Here Keller and Okrent disappoint us by prompting one of the fundamental admonitions to novice journalists:  Don't TELL the reader, SHOW the reader what you know.

The way to build reader confidence and improve the relevance of journalism would have been to provide an online link to Williams' raw data so readers could explore it for even richer insights and draw their own conclusions. 

It was in the early '90s, when JTJ began thinking about and researching the process that results in the journalist's product.  It eventually boiled down to the RRAW-P process: Research-->Reporting-->Analysis-->Writing and finally Publishing/Producing/Packaging.  The attached paper first appeared in the Social Science Computer Review in 1994.