Last week, I got an e-mail from a man who, although professing fear for his job security and personal safety, said he had information that the public ought to know about some ongoing governmental mischief. And he was willing to tell us about it.
Thinking that he was a public-spirited citizen trying to shed the light of righteousness on a hidden wrong, I passed his comments along to the metro desk.
Before long, reporter Henry Gomez sent him an inquiry. They went back and forth a bit, but when Gomez tried to get the fellow to cut to the chase, it turned out that our would-be whistleblower wanted to be paid.
Most people who have worked in a newsroom for very long have encountered something like that, and it’s one of the fastest ways there is to end a conversation. In the Good Old Days, a reporter would usually tell the person to go perform an unnatural act. This being the 2000s, Gomez just politely told the guy. “Sorry, we don’t pay. . . . If you have a change of heart, I’m here.”
That reaction often comes as a surprise to the callers. Perhaps they’ve read too many stories about People magazine paying millions for the first photos of Brad Pitt-Angelina Jolie offspring. In an age when everything seems to be for sale, it’s easy to understand why people who believe they have information of value would want to be paid for it. But like most newspapers (I’d say “all,” but “all” is never true), we don’t buy information like that. Here’s why:
We couldn’t trust it. If a source is telling us something just for the money, how would we know he wasn’t making things up, just for the money?
Paying for information would cost us credibility with our readers. How would our readers know? We would disclose it, of course. We would have to.
We would always feel like we needed a shower.
Our reporters would eventually get it on their own anyway. And when we get information ourselves, we know it’s real.
Plain Dealer Editor Susan Goldberg leaves no room for doubt.
“We don’t pay for information. Period,” she said. “At no newspaper where I’ve worked have we ever paid for information. We can say with certainty that we have confidence in the information we put in our stories because we got it ourselves and we know nobody embellished it for money.”
Having made the case that this issue is clear and unambiguous, I’ll now muddy the waters a bit.
Most reporters and editors have no compunction about buying a source dinner or drinks in the pursuit of a story. In fact, we’d rather do the buying than have sources wining and dining us. The Plain Dealer, and most newspapers, occasionally pay a known free-lance writer for a story. We have hired consultants to analyze financial data or scientific information that we have used to add weight and authority to certain stories.
If someone happens to take a good photograph where news is breaking, we would be very likely to buy it. If the same person wanted to sell us information gathered there, we probably would not pay for it, but might buy a bylined, first-person account instead, if we deemed it worthy.
What’s the difference?
Motive. Trust. Credibility. Transparency with our readers. In the above examples, the reporters are gathering their own information at dinner that will then be double-checked; we do our best to make sure that the free-lancers have no personal connection to the stories they write; we have paid for professional analysis that we disclose and confirm; we are purchasing a photograph, not an opinion or an untrained analysis.
All of those are different from paying for information from sources we don’t know and whose credibility we have no reason to trust.
Speaking of trust, when the e-mailer above said he would shop his information to a local TV station, I wondered whether he might have a more receptive audience in a medium whose standards might be different from ours.
Representatives from two television stations I spoke with said they doubted that their stations would pay the guy. I asked John Butte, former executive at WEWS Channel 5 and current director of teleproductions for Kent State University: Sounding remarkably like Goldberg, he said that never in his long TV news career had his station paid off an informant, and that he didn’t believe other local stations did either.
Just before writing this column, I e-mailed the guy who called us. Had he sold his info to another news organization?
“The other party is yet to get back to me with an offer,” he responded.
