Many editors are more comfortable upholding a newspaper’s standards for style and grammar than upholding ethical standards. Trust needs to be an important part of the editor-reporter relationship, but skepticism is part, too. As Poynter’s Roy Peter Clark noted last year, the editor sometimes needs to take the approach that Ronald Reagan took to arms control treaties: Trust but verify.

Confidential sources

Discuss with reporters how they grant confidentiality. On some beats and with some agencies and sources, confidentiality becomes necessary and routine. Make sure, though, that the routine never comes from the reporter. Editors and reporters should discuss confidentiality before the reporter turns in a story using with unnamed sources. Editors should discuss confidential sources with each of their reporters in at least three ways:

• Discuss in general how your reporters grant confidentiality. Make sure reporters try first to get people on the record. Make sure reporters know why a source wants confidentiality. Make sure reporters know it’s OK not to grant confidentiality if this source is not reliable or if this source should be speaking publicly. When a reporter grants confidentiality, make sure she seeks to get the source on the record later about points she plans to use in the story. Make sure the reporter asks confidential sources for documentation or for help in verifying the information the source is sharing. Your reporters need to know that you expect them to try to get information that they can attribute to named, knowledgeable sources. Your reporters should know that they must tell sources that you will have to know the sources’ names.
• As reporters work on stories, discuss sources with them. You should know when a story might involve confidential sources. You should learn the names of sources to whom reporters have granted confidentiality. You should learn the reasons for confidentiality and the terms of your reporter’s agreement. You should discuss with the reporter strategies for persuading a source to go on the record, for finding other on-the-record sources for the same information, for finding documentation that will verify the source’s information. Effective discussions with reporters as they are working on stories will prevent hasty decisions on sources made on deadline. Your discussions about confidentiality must be detailed enough to serve as a deterrent to fabrication of bogus sources by reporters. Your discussions also must be detailed enough that the honest reporter doesn’t want to grant confidentiality except in extreme cases.
• Read stories looking for references to unidentified sources. Some references are more subtle than the explicit “a transportation department official said” references. Watch for references such as “neighbors said” and “observers said.” Ask who the neighbors and observers are and why we aren’t quoting them by name. Make sure they actually are plural and not just a neighbor or an observer. Watch for allusions to unnamed sources, using passive verbs such as “are believed to be” or “are reported to” or through adverbs such as “reportedly” or “allegedly.” Ask who believes, who reports, who alleges and why you can’t name them. Ask whether the reporter can get that information from another source. Ask why that information has to be in the story. Ask whether the reporter has tried to get the source on the record about this specific fact.

Talk about ethics

Editors can set a tone for ethical behavior by talking about ethical issues with their reporters. When a case such as Judith Miller or Bob Woodward is in the news, talk with reporters about how they handle confidential sources. Ask whether they have any interesting confidential tips that they are pursuing or think they might pursue someday. When a newspaper fires a reporter for plagiarism or fabrication, express your outrage to your staff. Ask reporters what editors can do to catch reporters who are cheating and to protect honest reporters from the harm by fraudulent reporters. If you have a reporter on your staff who has gaps in his ethical education, you can fill those gaps by making your own standards clear. If you have a reporter on your staff who’s dishonest, you might be able to deter cheating by expressing your disgust and by discussing accountability. You hope your reporters will remain honest because of their own sense of ethics. But people without a strong ethical foundation want to keep their jobs and want to please their bosses. The importance you place on ethics will help shape the ethical values of young reporters and give pause to any reporters who don’t personally care much about ethics.

Demand verification

An editor’s most important question to reporters is “How do you know that?” Ask that question as reporters tell you about important facts they are finding in stories. Identify what they know from first-hand sources and when they are chasing rumors. Don’t discourage them from chasing rumors that would make good news stories, but make sure they know that second-hand information isn’t good enough if they can get first-hand information and/or documentation. Make sure your reporters ask their sources the same question: How do you know that? Asking “how do you know that?” will identify instances when your reporters are passing along common-knowledge information that they don’t know first-hand. Demanding verification will show that sometimes the common knowledge is wrong. Newsroom coach Rosalie Stemer adds a follow-up question editors should ask after the reporter answers “How do you know that?” Then ask, “How else do you know that?”

Ask reporters about the motivations of sources. Be skeptical of the motivations. If the motive is self-interest, beware that the source might twist, select or shade facts to serve that interest. If the motive appears altruistic, beware that the reporter might not have uncovered a self-interest that underlies the sense of altruism, however genuine it may be. If the reporter doesn’t know how your story is benefiting the source, the reporter may not know the full story.

Read stories skeptically. Do the math. Note the odd spellings and ask reporters about them if they haven’t cq’d them. If they have cq’d them, ask how they verified and make sure they didn’t just check their notes. When you read a quote that seems too good to be true, ask about the context.

Check out your suspicions

 Reporters and editors should be able to trust one another. But frequently in the investigations following discoveries of plagiarism or fabrication, we learn about doubts editors had about the reporter. Editors should act on their doubts. Ask tough questions of the reporter. If the reporter is worthy of your trust, this is where you will build trust. Keep in mind (and remind the reporter) that magazines use fact-checkers routinely, not because they distrust their reporters but because they want to get the facts right. In investigative projects, some newspapers do line-by-line editing, where the reporter shows the editor notes or documents to back up every fact or quote in the story. You don’t have to tell a reporter you’re suspicious. Say this is an important story and we want to be sure we have everything nailed down. Ask him to bring his notes up to your computer and have a seat. Then you go through and start asking, “How do you know this? How do you know that?” The reporter will show you notes or documents and your trust will grow. You’ll probably correct some minor detail in the process (line-by-line editing is never a bad idea, when you have the time) and the reporter will be glad you were that thorough. Or the reporter will make excuses about notes being left at home or lost and you’ll know you need to check your suspicions deeper. Consider routinely editing stories this way, asking the reporter to bring the notes and source documents with them to check facts. If a reporter has to fake several notebooks to get away with fabricating a story, she may decide it’s easier to actually do the work.

Some editors and reporters have complained that editors need to trust their reporters and the recent scandals have damaged that trust. That is indeed unfortunate, but lamenting the facts doesn’t change them. Consider, though, that magazines routinely use fact-checkers to call sources and verify information in stories. That doesn’t mean they don’t trust their reporters, just that they have higher standards of accuracy than newspapers. It also doesn’t make magazines immune from scandal, though it helps them deter and detect cheating by reporters.

If you have the slightest doubt about a reporter or a story, trust your instincts. Check the story out, ask some tough questions. Hold the story if you must. Don’t publish a story you don’t trust. Again and again as scandals of fabrication or plagiarism unfold, editors confess that they had doubts about something but didn’t voice them or didn’t pursue them aggressively enough.

To check for plagiarism: You can run a first check yourself quickly using Google. Pick a few passages that ought to be unique and paste them inside quotation marks in the Google search window. If you chose a long phrase, you should get few, if any, hits. The more distinct the phrase, the more you should scrutinize any hits at all. (Be sure that you put quotation marks around the passage in the search window. You get no hits on the nine words in italics above, checking Google or Google News, with quote marks, but 638,000 hits without quotation marks.) Avoid using clichés in this check because they will turn up lots of hits. For instance, “sounded like a freight train” gets more than 800 hits because people always say that about tornadoes. That doesn’t mean your reporter was unoriginal, just that her sources were.

Google is free and easy to use, but it doesn’t catch many stories that are no longer posted. You can check a broader news database by checking unique phrases in Lexis-Nexis or another news database. Commercial services such as mydropbox.com can check a whole story for you.

To check for fabrication: If you wonder whether a source actually exists, run the name through some databases. Phone books are a place to start, though increasingly less useful as more people use cell phones as home phones. Learn what databases your newsroom has readily available, such as driver’s licenses or voter registration. Commercial databases such as AutoTrack are pretty thorough. A person would need to live a pretty sheltered life not to show up on AutoTrack. As a deterrent to fabrication and an aid in checking sources, you could ask reporters to list sources’ phone numbers, addresses, ages or similar identifying information in notes at the top of a story.

To deter and detect plagiarism or fabrication: Discuss with other editors whether your paper should routinely send follow-up questionnaires to all the sources in randomly selected stories, asking whether your reporters in fact interviewed them and whether they were quoted accurately, depicted fairly, etc. You will hear some trivial complaints and some complaints you will dismiss from sources who were unable to “spin” scrupulous reporters. Mostly you will hear that your reporters are accurate and honest. But if your reporters are fabricating, you will learn that people in their stories don’t exist or never talked to your reporters. If your reporters are plagiarizing, you will learn that the source did say that, but two years ago to another reporter, not last week to your reporter.