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.