What’s the point of learning APA or MLA citation in high school and college but journalists don’t even bother with it? Insane to me.
Would address the complaints of the author _and_ help readers "trust but verify" the claims. Of course, some sources can’t be cited properly (ie, "source close to inner circle of the family") but at least we can discern whether "journalist" did their DD or copied the source from another journalist (or just pulled it out of their ass)
Every journalist will experience politicians and other powerful people wanting to tell them things "off the record". If they enter into those kind of agreements they are also betraying their profession and their audience.
Citation needed.
/ Former journalist
An anonymous source has the power to decide what information she lets the journalist have, and thus she controls the exchange. If the journalist does something to displease the source, then the journalist is cut off from the information.
Obviously they have an agenda, and want to advance it, so you need to figure out what that agenda is.
The next challenge is confirming that what they are telling you is true, to an appropriate level of confidence at least. Your professional ethics and your editor (and your legal team at larger publications) won't let you publish if you can't do that.
There are many ways you can do that - ask them to show you supporting evidence (usually documents) for example - but the most common is to try and find a different source who can confirm what they are telling you is true.
If you can get two sources - anonymous or not - to confirm the same detail and you're reasonably confident that those sources don't know about each other that's often good enough to get to something you can publish.
* As much as needed for the public to be able to verify.
That’s really not the point of journalism.
Not every story makes it to HN’s front page let alone every document. That kind of filtering for interesting info has real value as I don’t want to read every court document, press release, etc for relevant information.
My point was nobody comes back if it’s not generally interesting, that’s the baseline for the industry.
Still someone needed to find the underlying interesting bit of information before everyone else could add their own spin to it.
Because journalism doesn't use the same type of citation as an academic paper. It's an entirely different type of writing, for a different purpose, and a different audience.
If you want to know why journalists use anonymous sources, you could just Google it: https://www.nytimes.com/article/why-new-york-times-anonymous...
But I suppose complaining on the internet and making up false equivalencies is better for feeding one's righteous indignation.
It's when they do science reporting and say "a new study says blah" without linking to the study. Or they paraphrase a law proposal submitted by some lawmaker without linking to the original text. Or they repeat something they got from another news source without pointing it out. And even if they do, as the previous poster mention, it is subject to link rot. Frankly I think they do that because of the attention economy. Less eyeballs leaving their site.
If a journalist protects her sources then she can rely on a steady stream of information from them. If she divulges or betrays those sources, they could be reluctant to feed her further information. A source may be at political or legal risk for leaking to the press. The journalist therefore acknowledges those risks by protecting the identities of the sources.
It is the editorial board of the news outlet who is responsible for vetting sources and fact-checking. Another very important function of journalism is analysis. The editorial board and the reporters are collating various sources of information and providing their expertise by analyzing these facts, distilling them and presenting them to the public with a unified front.
It is true that an encyclopedia such as Wikipedia has different standards, and generally citations on an encyclopedia must be transparent and open. Encyclopedias are tertiary sources, not journalism, and they rely on that analysis and presentation by journalistic sources in order to present comprehensive information on a topic.
Now with all that being said, TFA seems to be about an independent journalist who is the victim of widespread plagiarism. That isn't nearly the same thing. If this journalist is getting ripped off by major news outlets, that is certainly a problem. Every journalist deserves a byline and credit for writing those stories. This journalist is not a source, in herself, but rather producing print-ready material that should not be ripped off, willy-nilly, by any outlet that thinks they can get away with it. If these allegations are true, then that is quite unjust.
Journalists are generally very good at attributing information to journalistic sources. That is, when they relay a claim someone has made, they state who made that claim - ideally by naming them, but if the person making the claim wishes to remain anonymous and the journalist chooses to respect that anonymity, by attributing the information to e.g. ‘sources familiar with the matter’; in such a case the journalist is asserting ‘I know this person is in a position to know this information, but I can’t tell you who that is’.
That’s all fine. And has nothing to do with APA or MLA citation standards though.
When it comes to citing reporting from other media, there’s definitely some sloppiness. In general the instinct is to use the same ‘journalistic sourcing’ standard as above, but caveat it with a sort of hearsay warning: ‘according to reporting in the Washington Post, sources familiar with the meeting said “…”’. And that’s where Marisa Kabas’s complaints lie: she wants to get that level of attribution which print journalists typically accord one another, and not be relegated to ‘an independent journalist’.
But when it comes to citations, the thing you’re most right about where journalists often do not cite their sources is in the form of linking to primary material they used in preparation of the report. Academic papers, government reports, court judgements, official transcripts of speeches… there’s a lot of primary documents it would be great to be able to get hold of if you want to dig further into a story.
It's different than a journalist doing work where their identity could be problematic.
Only by twisting the meaning of plagiarism to be defined as word-for-word.
Universities intensively train students to accept plagiarism so long as the copy is sufficiently reworded (and hopefully referenced). That sick and pointless system is ironically being exposed by student usage of LLMs.
But the complaint that bigger outlets didn't immediately follow her story by crediting her seems like an understandable situation from the other outlets' point of view. Who will take the heat if it's wrong? A popular outlet that runs with it will get shit on if it's wrong, even if it's citing the independent journalist as the source (in a way they won't if they were just following another popular outlet).
So these outlets need to either 1) verify it on their own, or 2) cite another popular outlet.
It'd still be courteous to name the original reporter, but until she's built enough clout and reputation to stand on her own as a credible source, it seems structural that this will keep happening.
ty6853•3h ago
salomonk_mur•3h ago