One story, two ethical decisions and a threat of suicide: a combination that would create a lively discussion in any newsroom.

It started as an intriguing tip: Two years ago, a suburban cop was fired because he was stopping teenage boys, threatening to give them speeding tickets, and then letting them go in exchange for sex. But the police chief did not refer the case to the district attorney for possible charges, avoiding embarrassing publicity for the department. Now, two years later, and in the wake of other allegations about a troubled police department, our sources wanted us to know about this episode.

We located two of the victims, and they confirmed what had happened. One victim, now 24 years old, even agreed to talk about it on camera, without having his identity concealed. He described, in detail, the sexual contact in the officer’s apartment when he was 19 years old.

But a few days later, the young man called us back. He’d changed his mind. He did not want to be on TV.

Ethical decision #1: Should we air the interview? He did the interview voluntarily. We had it "in the can." He was not retracting his statement, simply asking that we not use his name or picture. We decided to use the interview, masking the man’s identity electronically. We did so because he was, essentially, a sexual assault victim, and we routinely withhold the names of such victims. Furthermore, it was his information that was important, not his identity.

Ethical decision #2 proved to be a lot more difficult. A week later, we tracked down the former officer, living in a small town 150 miles away. We surreptitiously took pictures of him working in his yard and then approached him for an interview.

When we told him why we were there, he immediately broke down. He asked to speak to me alone. He tearfully confessed to what he’d done, told me he’d tried to put that ugly period in his life behind him, and assured me he’d had no contact with teenagers since then. He said he’d been receiving counseling from a minister. And then he asked if we were going to put his story on TV.

When I told him why we were there, he said, and I’ll never forget his words: "Well, you’ve just made up my mind. I’m going to get my shotgun and go out into a farm field and kill myself. I hate myself for what I’ve done. My parents don’t know why I left town. And I can’t stand the thought of them finding out."

I spent the next hour trying to talk the man out of committing suicide. I told him he shouldn’t do anything foolish since there was a chance the story might not air, that nothing he’d done was worth dying for. I coaxed. I cajoled. I pleaded. It was, perhaps the most difficult hour of my life.

He finally assured me he wouldn’t do anything until he’d heard from me. We left and went straight to his church. We told his minister about the suicide threat. The minister agreed to visit the man immediately.

We drove back to the newsroom for discussions with news management and the station attorney. Legally, the story was clean. We had all the facts nailed down, including a confession.

Journalistically, we had a good story. But ethically, we had a problem. Could we tell this story, knowing it might cause a man to take his life?

We wrestled with other questions as well: Was it still a story, since the incidents had happened a few years ago? If so, what was the most important part of the story? And was this man still using his authority to take advantage of teenagers?

We came up with these answers:

Because the officer had resigned, he was no longer in a position to use his badge to take advantage of teenagers. He had assured me he was not involved in activities that put him in contact with young people. And we knew, if we did a story, the D.A. would investigate to find out if he was telling the truth and letting him know he was being watched.

We decided it was still a story. But we believed an equally important part of the story was the fact that the police chief had allowed the officer to resign, without referring the case to the D.A.

Yet, we did not want to do a story, that might result in a man’s suicide.

We decided to air the story, withholding the former officer’s identity. We electronically altered our videotape of the man working in his yard so he could not be recognized. We notified him in advance, through his minister. In our story, we told the viewers about the sexual incidents. And we explained how the police chief had handled the case.

The D.A. immediately launched an investigation. Months later, after interviewing everyone involved, the D.A. decided he was not going to prosecute the former officer, so long as he had no further contact with teenagers. The D.A. criticized the police chief for the way he had handled the case. But the D.A. ruled the chief had not acted criminally.

The police chief, declaring himself cleared of criminal wrongdoing and citing his age, 55, immediately resigned.

The former officer did not kill himself.

We believe we handled this case responsibly. But there is a larger issue: Can the threat of suicide be enough to kill a story? If so, some important stories probably would go unreported. Each case, we decided, must be based on its own set of facts.

For further analysis of this issue, see "How to handle suicide threats".

I knew something didn’t figure right in the city budget. Unfortunately, I didn’t realize the extent until an hour before deadline. No problem I thought, I’ll just call my trusty source, Fred Ebeneau, the city finance director. I dialed his phone number, but heard a recording — "The number you have called . . ." The mechanical voice gave the new number.

I started dialing, but stopped. Wait a minute, I thought. That new prefix is nowhere near Paterson. I called information and found out it was in Toms River, at least an hour away.

By law, all department heads and most other employees, had to live within city limits. My "friend" Fred could be immediately fired.

Here was the number three official in the city administration flouting the residency laws. The residency requirement had been a topic of hot debate in City Hall because a deputy fire chief was claiming he was being blackballed from the department’s top job because of his outside-the-city address. Mayor Frank Graves had said publicly that he believed in the residency statute above almost anything else for determining who could work what jobs for the city.

There was also the competition factor to consider. I worked for the North Jersey Herald & News and would do almost anything to beat my rival, the much bigger Record in Hackensack.

To be honest, I would not hesitate reporting on almost any other official. But Fred was more than just a source, he was just about the only person inside the Graves cabinet that I could trust to tell the truth. Any time I doubted the administration’s calculations on the budget, I called Fred who would set me straight. Fred had also steered me to some major front-page stories. As a source, he was invaluable.

I did nothing that night. I did not even mention it to my editors because they would have wanted me to run with it right away. I knew holding the story could affect my credibility as a reporter. After all, I was cutting someone a break just because he had helped me.

But it takes time to develop a source like this, especially in a tight-lipped and well-controlled administration like the one in Paterson. After beating your head against stone walls all day, it was nice to find an open door. I liked Fred. At least this one night, I wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt.

The next day, I confronted Fred. He told me he lived in Toms River because it had a fine special education program and he had a son with a learning disability. Fred did not try to sway me from writing any story.

Whatever Fred’s reason, he was still breaking the law. I had heard that other members of the Graves cabinet were not living in the city, but here I had proof.

I weighed the facts. On one side, I had a story and a good one. A high-ranking city official, responsible for helping set tax rates, did not live in the city, contrary to the law. On the face of it, it was my job as a reporter to tell that story.

But on the other side, Fred was a good source with whom I had developed a relationship over a year’s time. Not only did he make my job easier, he gave me some of the best stories I had written while covering the city. If anyone argued that I had a personal stake involved, I could just point out the warts within the government that Fred had helped me expose.

In the end, that was the final argument that tipped the scale toward not writing the story. I honestly felt that my readers would be best served by having Fred in his job.

The story may have remained buried, except for Andy Torricicollo, a city resident who made it his business to find and right all wrongs in the Paterson government. Andy also had no reservations about calling city employees at home. One night he tried Fred’s number. He heard the same recording. He learned where Fred lived.

Andy approached me before the next council meeting, about a week later. "Do you know where Fred lives?" he asked me. I played dumb and he told me. Then he told me he was going to bring this before the council. "It isn’t fair that we have to live in the city and face the problems and the taxes and someone like him who controls our money, should live somewhere else," he said.

I told Andy it would be a mistake to tell the council about Fred. I explained to him that Fred helped the residents more by telling the truth about some of the problems in the city than by living in the city.

But Andy told the council during the public session. The next day, The Record made it the lead of the story. I buried it in my story, leading with the possible axing of some of the city’s social programs, which I considered to be more important.

One of my editors said I should have lead with Fred’s residency. "This is a good story, why wasn’t it higher?"

"The social programs affect more people," I said. I only received a shake of the head. "Why didn’t you know about this sooner?" I didn’t answer.

Fred lost his job and took a better-paying one with the State Department of Community Affairs.

The new city finance director was a good friend of the mayor. She pleasantly referred almost all questions to him.

Things have changed in the state capitol pressrooms, and in most other pressrooms too, I suspect. Reporters practice their craft differently now than they did when I first entered the Statehouse in Springfield, IL, 36 years ago.

Today, the relationship between the press and the politicians is less relaxed and more adversarial. And I’m kind of sorry about that.

I’ve always been comfortable around politicians. They’re a pretty outgoing breed. And they’re obviously interested in the things that shape our lives and our institutions or they wouldn’t be in politics.

Most of them, I’m convinced, are not really much different from the rest of us, reporters included. So why does the new generation of journalists treat them with such disdain? Why the detachment to the point of indifference? Why the preoccupation with questioning motives and searching for minor misdeeds?

Perhaps it’s the legacy of Watergate. Perhaps the air has been poisoned forever. I hope not.

When I first began covering politics and government at the state level, most reporters at the capitol lived just like the lawmakers in a hotel, out of a suitcase. We spent our evenings drinking with politicians, sometimes dining with them, maybe even engaging in a friendly game of cards. But mostly just talking or arguing issues, politics or strategy, and building mutual contacts and trust.

Most of the Statehouse press corps in those days were lifers. They had stayed around long enough to build the expertise that permits a reporter to go below the surface and to offer readers not just what occurs, but why and how.

You really don’t see as much of that anymore. The guys in the Statehouse pressroom tend these days to stick around for a few years and then move on to Washington or into better-paying positions, including governmental public relations.

I think that this constant shuffling of folks into and out of the Statehouse pressrooms is unfortunate. It can result in a lack of perspective and it makes it easier for the governmental flacks and campaign spin doctors to orchestrate what the public gets in the way of political news and analysis.

But I guess it’s the detachment that bothers me the most. Journalists who spend a career covering government have a very special body of knowledge and experience — and ought to use it for the benefit of the community.

I’d like to think that readers are our constituents just as they are the constituents of the lawmakers. It’s a shame to divorce ourselves so totally from the proceedings of government that we waste that unique body of knowledge and experience we’ve acquired. An old hand in the Statehouse pressroom shouldn’t have to apologize for occasionally dipping his oar into the legislative process.

I recall talking a few years ago with the chairman of the Peoria County Board who was complaining about the time and expense to the county caused by a state law requirement that any local liquor license suspension be subject to an appeal to the state and a second hearing.

He felt it wasn’t fair that county prosecutors had to make their case at the local level and expose all their evidence and testimony and then go through a second hearing at the state level where the defense had an opportunity to reshape its case or present new testimony.

I agreed. When I returned to the Statehouse, I asked a friendly legislator who had a bill pending on a separate provision of the Liquor Code to amend the measure to take care of this inequity.

That’s the kind of "legislating" a newsman can do without jeopardizing reputation or integrity.

Another time, I worked with legislators to steer to passage a bill calling for a multi-million dollar bond issue for construction of civic centers downstate — smaller versions of the massive convention center the state had built for Chicago.

Tourism is as important to Peoria, Rockford or Springfield as it is to Chicago and I’m proud to have played a role in getting the civic centers.

I also don’t think it’s improper to suggest to a legislator that a bill doesn’t really do what it purports to do. These are busy people and they often rely on staff to prepare the measures they introduce.

Some years ago, a state lawmaker introduced a bill he said would provide a state subsidy for mass transit districts throughout the state. But because of a drafting error, the bill would have provided funds only for the transit systems in Chicago and in his own area near St. Louis.

I pointed out to him the error in the drafting and suggested that failure to correct it might cause him some political embarrassment in those communities slighted — and likely some votes, too. When the bill became law later that year, it was fair to every segment of the state.

Can a reporter get too close to sources or people he covers? Sure. That’s always a danger. But it has been my experience that a guy you’ve shared a drink or swapped a story with can take a hit when he’s got it coming just as long as the critical story deals with fact.

The new breed of journalists may be squeaky clean, but I think they shortchange their readers and themselves if they treat the folks they cover with detachment that borders on disdain and also fail to use their special knowledge and experience to its best advantage.

A teenager walks into an elementary school and randomly fires a pistol, killing two children and wounding nine other people. It is called the worst school shooting in history, and draws national attention. The teenager’s thoughts are of intense public interest.

You are given the number of a telephone in the locked ward of the mental hospital where the suspect is being kept until doctors form an opinion of his competency to stand trial.

Do you call the suspect? Do you report what he says?

A reporter for The State, Columbia, S.C., did telephone that suspect and The State did publish some of his comments.

The suspect, James Wilson, a 19-year-old high school dropout, has pleaded guilty but mentally ill and has been sentenced to death in South Carolina’s electric chair for those shootings on September 26, 1988.

With a number provided by Wilson’s grandmother - who said he was lucid - and at her suggestion, the reporter had two conversations with Wilson.

The result was a page 1 story headlined "Shootings ‘like a dream’ ."

In that story, Wilson admitted to the shootings and said he felt "real bad about what happened." He also talked about a People magazine article on shootings at an elementary school in Winnetka, IL, and a book about Wayne Gacy’s killings, which he had just read.

Wilson had torn the article from People and "I read it every day. I had it for a few months," he said, adding that he could understand that killer. "I think I may have copied her in a way."

He talked, too, about his childhood - how he had felt neglected, how he had been abused and ridiculed by schoolmates and his father. He said he had thought a lot before taking his grandfather’s pistol, buying cartridges and driving to the school.

The State published those comments, but not without forethought and caution.

Before telephoning Wilson, the reporter and an editor discussed the lack of taping equipment and of how they would verify the identity of who was reached on the telephone.

A man answered the telephone and summoned Wilson by hollering his name. A youth with strong country drawl came to the phone. The reporter identified himself and Wilson responded "Yes, sir," when asked if he would like to talk about the shootings.

Wilson’s identity was verified by answers to several questions, including his birth date, and the location of a particular magazine in his home.

Questions were asked to determine his mental state and ability to understand that the newspaper was seeking his opinions for publication. He was asked about his surroundings and how he felt he was being treated. Questions were repeated two or three times to compare answers.

In a second interview, Wilson was asked to clarify ambiguous or incomplete answers. Wilson said he was on no medication at the hospital other than a pill to help him sleep at night. The interviews occurred between 5 p.m. and 9 p.m.

Three or four of us read the transcriptions of the telephone conversations with Wilson, and our lawyer was involved in our deliberations. My greatest concern was whether Wilson was lucid, that whatever he had to say was newsworthy.

After that call, I was convinced that Wilson knew exactly what he was doing. Our primary concern was getting the information. In deciding whether to publish, I was compelled by some of the things Wilson had said, where he basically said why he had gone on that rampage.

The State published Wilson’s comments the next day. Advocacy groups and lawyers accused the newspaper of being sensationalistic, taking advantage of a mentally ill person and denying the suspect benefit of counsel.

The shootings were a sensational event. But the fact that we could offer the reader some insight into the thinking of someone who would commit such a crime was compelling reason to publish.

The criticism that Wilson was mentally ill and we were taking advantage of him is off base. He was extremely lucid and artful and cagey during the interviews with us.

There is no question that "Jamie" Wilson is crazy in the conversational sense. Before the shootings, he had a long history of psychiatric treatment in a variety of mental health facilities but had always been released. His family had tried to have him judged mentally ill, but he had been judged sane repeatedly.

The criticism that as a newspaper we have a responsibility to aid a defendant in getting a fair trial is preposterous. A complex system of courts protects and defends suspects and the public. Our role is to provide information that the public can use in the evolution of public policy, which includes operation of the courts.

We published "Jamie" Wilson’s story because it allowed the public to hear the suspect talk about his state of mind. The story satisfied the question of why, which is seldom answered in cases like this.

Would we handle the Wilson story in the same way, given a second chance? Yes.

Would we call another suspect at a state mental hospital? Maybe, depending on circumstances. In the Wilson story, we helped the public better understand a tragedy and the weaknesses in a mental health system. We would need equally compelling reasons to publish any information gained by another call to a state hospital.

At 28, Chip Smith carried impressive credentials.

A star athlete in college and an honors graduate, he had just been named "Teacher of the Year" at Rock Hill High School. A year earlier he had been chosen "Beginning Teacher of the Year" for the entire district. He was an assistant baseball coach about to move into the top job. He was handsome, affable and popular.

In an interview for The Charlotte Observer about his team, he told me he had roomed with George Brett during a brief stint in the majors, studied at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, and published a book about John Kennedy’s assassination.

His story was too good to pass up. In the end, the story would cost Chip Smith a career. We had to decide whether it might also cost him his life.

Before a second interview with Smith, I made routine background checks. Kansas City had no record of his playing in the Royals’ system. McGraw Hill, his reputed publisher, had not heard of him.

I did not tell Smith of those calls, and in the second interview he repeated his claims and even elaborated on some.

Further reporting demolished other claims. Although nominated for a Rhodes Scholarship, he never became a finalist as he claimed on his resume, let alone the scholar he bragged about being. He had not played varsity basketball in college, although he had added that to his impressive athletic record.

Confronted, a shaken Smith acknowledged the embellishments and said he didn’t know how the stories had started; but they had snowballed. Please, he pleaded, don’t write an article exposing the lies.

The decision to write wasn’t a foregone conclusion. Discussions raised these questions, among others: Did the story reach the news threshold, or was it a private matter? What had Smith done? He was not a public official, he had not robbed a bank, and he hadn’t really hurt anyone.

Moreover, he didn’t live in Charlotte, but in a smaller city nearby. Wouldn’t people there consider the exposure an invasion of privacy, a personal embarrassment the paper could have avoided?

On the other hand, his tales about the Kennedy book and the Rhodes Scholarship had become public when his hometown paper ran an admiring interview. Students and teachers had heard Smith brag about being an All- American basketball star and a major league baseball player. While teachers privately questioned his accomplishments, students marveled.

By augmenting his stature, his deceits cemented his status as a role model.

Smith had a position of public trust; "Teacher of the Year" accolades further set him apart as a model. At least part of his public image was based on misrepresentations.

We thought it was important for the community, and particularly the students, to know that.

"Publication in The Observer of the facts clearly would make his life more complicated," Editor Rich Oppel recalls, "but the story was coming out one way or the other."

We decided to publish, and told Smith.

Then his mother came to talk to Oppel, an acquaintance. Why write the story? she asked. What’s the point, or the news? Had he hurt anyone? If we published the story, she said, Chip Smith would commit suicide.

Now, news judgment became moral judgment.

Oppel questioned Smith’s mother closely, asking why she feared for his life. It was simply a mother’s concern, he decided. "I am pretty sure that I would not have agreed not to publish because of a death threat," Oppel says. "If you do that, doesn’t a death threat become the way to keep a story out of the paper?

"But I probably would have taken the time to consult with the story subject’s physician or clergyman, or perhaps even talked to police."

After the story ran, community sentiment was uniformly sympathetic to Smith and negative to the newspaper. He lost his job at Rock Hill High School and went to work for his mother’s catering business in Charlotte.

Did we make the right decisions?

On news judgment, yes. On the question of moral judgment, I don’t know.

Smith didn’t commit suicide; others have. As a reporter, I don’t feel qualified to decide whether a person will do what those close to him fear he may. Editor Oppel, who had talked to Smith’s mother, obviously had a different opinion, and, as he said, Smith, "like the rest of us, is responsible for his own actions."

Late at night, at the bar, reporters and editors tell each other tales about how they charm information out of their sources, flirt their way past security guards and gently lead interviewees down the garden path.

Journalists know they’d best avoid actual romantic involvement with their sources — and that the other extreme, naked skepticism, is unlikely to encourage sources to spill their guts.

But what about romancing a story? Are you honor bound to tell an interviewee the truth about the focus of your story? Or is it OK to let sources hang themselves without having a clue where you’re heading?

One silver lining in the cloud of recent Supreme Court decisions is that journalists are taking a new and careful look at reporter-source relationships (see also "Thou shalt not break thy promise" regarding Cohen V. Cowles as well as "The great quote question" and "Thou shalt not concoct thy quote" regarding Masson v. New Yorker). Before, it was easy to be cavalier with sources, if one were so inclined, because the relationship apparently had no legal standing.

It’s different now. Reporters need to consider their promises very carefully since they’re no longer free to decide when it’s alright to break them. And what counts as accurate representation of a source’s words has been dissected as never before.

Yet other subtle ethical quandaries still strew the path between what reporters promise and what newsrooms print or broadcast. Attention now to the subtleties of how reporters ought to treat sources may forestall courts from providing further dictates of how they must.

For example, reporters don’t want to tip their hands, but sources feel burned if they don’t know from the start what the reporters have in mind. What do reporters owe their sources? In this case, other professions can’t provide much guidance. Reporters don’t owe sources the kinds of things doctors owe patients or lawyers owe clients. There, the professional is obliged to act in the best interest of the lay person involved. Reporters who did the same would commit the egregious professional sin of acting as PR agents.

There is something about the reporter-source relationship that looks a little like what happens between a judge and a defendant at a juryless trial. Like the judge, the reporter makes decisions that have enormous impact on the source’s life. Certainly the source, like the defendant, is trying to cut the best deal possible. But no matter how manipulative or malevolent a source may be, the reporter literally has the last word.

Even this analogy breaks down. Sources aren’t always bad guys; a story isn’t a prison sentence. And the source, unlike the defendant, is free to walk away despite the reporter’s threats or enticements.

But good reporters treat their sources with respect. Olive Talley, reporter for The Dallas Morning News, tells sources what she knows prior to publication, but not necessarily early in an investigation. "Your opinion is not fully formed early on. You might not have all the facts," Talley says. And the interview itself might answer some suspicions.

But before the story hits the streets, sources should have the opportunity to comment. "It’s only fair," she adds. "I believe that we have a great responsibility to inform our sources, but timing is critical. It’s not, ‘Do we?’ but ‘When do we?’" Talley views her practice as pragmatic as well as ethical. "I operate on a level of honesty because I think that people respond better to it."

Even with the increasing amount of time reporters spend prying information from computers today, real live sources are still necessary to get the job done.

And people don’t like to be fooled. They especially don’t like it when reporters pretend to admire them while preparing to nail them to the wall. They don’t like it when the context of quotes changes between interview and publication.

Sources who’ve been deceived avoid talking to reporters, as do their friends. Or if they talk at all, they do so in such a careful and limited way that reporters wind up with little real information.

The need for reporters to be honest, straightforward and clear extends even to the sleaziest of sources. What if it were known that reporters would deceive only the bad guys? If reporters always seem friendly, still sources would never know if the reporter was being honest with them.

A story that’s won through seduction is sorcery, not sourcing. No professionals (except magicians) can last long if trickery becomes known as the usual method of operation.

"In this libel case, a public figure claims he was defamed by an author who, with full knowledge of the inaccuracy, used quotation marks to attribute to him comments he had not made."

—Masson v. New Yorker

If Janet Malcolm had let Jeffrey Masson read her profile of him for The New Yorker ahead of publication, a law suit recently sustained by the U.S. Supreme Court probably never would have progressed to its current dangerous stage.

Most journalists oppose pre-publication review (PPR, for short) on ethical and legal grounds. They won’t show an entire story or even part of it to a source in manuscript form. They won’t participate in telephone readbacks. They won’t check direct quotations for accuracy and context.

But that journalistic taboo is misguided. I have practiced PPR as a newspaper staff writer, a magazine freelancer and a book author. Never have I regretted my practice. What I do regret is failing to do it during the first decade of my career because of mindless adherence to tradition.

I started using PPR occasionally while working as a project reporter on the Des Moines Register in the mid-70s. It was the first time I had the luxury of writing non-deadline stories and therefore the opportunity to check for accuracy. Many sources had feared talking to me, knowing when I called, it usually meant they’d be part of an investigative piece. But promising them the chance to check my manuscript gave them the self-assurance to talk after all.

It was nearly ten years ago that I started making PPR my normal practice. The story that played a major role in my decision was the same one that led me to forever abandon relying on anonymous sources. Ironically, it was not an investigative piece but a fairly light feature for a leading journalism magazine.

The topic: computer-assisted reporting, something very new in 1982. My peg was a Washington correspondent for a major metropolitan daily who’d devised marvelous techniques for building computer databases that yielded interesting pieces. Some of the reporter’s colleagues, however, disliked this newfangled journalism. I quoted one of the detractors, anonymously. My point: to show that anybody considering such a high-tech method might run into newsroom doubters.

That anonymous quote started a witch hunt within the newsroom to identify my source. The Washington bureau chief begged me, then angrily ordered me, to reveal the name to him. I refused. The anonymous source was upset, too, because of the witch hunt and because he/she felt I’d failed to use strong enough criticism.

During the midst of this brouhaha, I attended my first journalism ethics conference and realized the stupidity of anonymous sourcing and of risking inaccuracy unnecessarily.

Journalists have lots of ethical obligations; at or near the top of the list is accuracy. And accuracy encompasses a great deal, including getting facts straight, quotations verbatim, paraphrases in proper form when eschewing exact quotes, and providing context. PPR allows reporters and editors to accomplish those goals without surrendering control over the ultimate story.

Maybe Janet Malcolm will become a convert. Her main outlet has always been The New Yorker, which was previously renowned for its fact-checking. But her profile of psychoanalyst Masson was checked only part way. If he’d been permitted to review his quotes, he and Malcolm might have worked out their differences. Instead, they’re enmeshed in a multi-million dollar, multi-year, unnecessary libel action that could seriously erode journalists’ First Amendment protections.

By now, numerous journalists reading this are likely apoplectic. I’ve raised this topic in enough newsrooms while conducting investigative reporting workshops to know I’ll get hate letters and enraged phone calls. But the prospect of the Malcolm-Masson dispute going to trial is reason enough to subject myself to the ire once more. And every time I raise the subject, I hear from journalists who practice PPR but fear coming out of the closet.

PPR has many benefits. First, it often gets me access to sources otherwise reluctant to talk because they’ve been misquoted or because they have a vested interest in keeping quiet, or both. My written promise of pre-publication review puts some of their fears at rest. Of course, I spell out that the review is for purposes of accuracy only and that I retain total control over whether to make alterations.

Second, PPR has occasionally caught errors of fact or interpretation, which is the point.

Third, PPR has jogged the memory of sources, who often offer me even better quotes, even more compelling evidence, than during the original interview.

The objections I hear from journalists fall into four broad categories:

Using PPR might spare media the necessity of running corrections and clarifications almost daily. It is shocking that some magazines, The New Yorker included, some newspapers and perhaps the majority of broadcast stations afford no opportunities for setting the record straight, short of litigation.

Any journalist condemning pre-publication review reflexively — because "it just isn’t done" — ought to try it at least once. In the unlikely event it backfires, then there is cause for debate.

"The question before us is whether the First Amendment prohibits a plaintiff from recovering damages . . . for a newspaper’s breach of confidentiality . . . We hold that it does not."

—Cohen v. Cowles Media

When the Supreme Court ruled in June that journalists’ promises to sources can be legally binding, Al Larkin felt compelled to act.

As managing editor for administration at The Boston Globe, Larkin posted a memo restating the paper’s policy of protecting the identity of confidential sources. He then cautioned reporters that "this decision applies to almost any agreement reached with a source, not just an agreement not to reveal their identity. It is not a good idea to make promises to sources."

Of course that’s true, but it’s sad that it had to be written in this context and that what should have been a call for higher professional and ethical standards became a warning about legal repercussions.

But that’s just one of the unhappy legacies of Cohen v. Cowles, a case that’s bad news for journalists — and not only because it was arguably the worst example for such a test.

The case was spawned by the decision of two Minnesota newspapers to identify a source who’d been promised anonymity. The justification by the St. Paul Pioneer Press Dispatch and Minneapolis Star Tribune: that the campaign smears dished out by political consultant Dan Cohen were less newsworthy than the fact that he was the source of the dirt.

What the Minnesota editors ignored was that most journalists have been willing to serve time and pay fines rather than reveal the identity of a source promised confidentiality. It’s one of the few subjects on which virtually all journalists agree, and it’s been that way from the beginning of modern journalism.

Courts have recognized journalists’ belief that reporter-source agreements are inviolable since as far back as 1878, when a reporter sued a competing paper for libel for printing an unfounded story that he’d broken a promise of confidentiality. The Michigan Supreme Court backed his claim that, just as calling a woman a harlot is libel unless it’s true, it is inherently defamatory to say a reporter reveals sources.

In the relatively rare cases when a source is burned, the rule is that heavy counterweights are necessary to justify it. A survey I conducted while Cohen was pending showed that journalists usually reveal sources only as a last resort, and only when faced with an ethically significant conflict (such as to save a life or prevent a serious crime) — not for what might be called the Minnesota standard: because the source’s identity is newsworthy.

The rejection of that justification was shown by the number of media organizations that declined to join the friend-of-the-court brief filed in Cohen. While some heavy hitters did show up, notably The New York Times, the lack of unanimity on what was supposed to be an important First Amendment test revealed the feeling that the case had a noxious odor.

But now that it’s over, journalists have to live with the fallout from the Supreme Court’s decision.

The ruling likely will prompt more and different kinds of suits by aggrieved sources. Some, like Cohen, will file breach-of-promise suits for being identified. But others will see it as an opportunity to sue reporters for all sorts of other reasons.

Since all promises are covered, sources might claim reporters who’d promised to show them in a particular light failed to do so. That was the basis for an Idaho suit by a woman who said a reporter falsely promised to present her favorably in a story about the homeless. That suit was dismissed, but more are sure to follow. And since deals with sources are almost always verbal, juries might be torn over whom to believe, the journalist or the source.

Other suits are likely to result from the court’s rejection of the newspapers’ key argument, that the First Amendment gives the press a near-absolute right to publish truthful information about newsworthy events. Cohen was a public figure and the source of the information, just as the papers said, but that wasn’t enough to prevent this further erosion of press freedoms.

In addition, the case may weaken campaigns for stronger shield laws. Some journalists interpreted the Cohen ruling as tantamount to a national shield law because, they reasoned, by rejecting the Minnesota papers’ actions, the court was in effect blessing the sanctity of reporter-source agreements. But the door doesn’t swing both ways. The court simply repeated its longstanding position that the First Amendment doesn’t make reporters immune from generally applicable state laws, such as those requiring people to keep their promises. The justices offered no new legal protections for reporters from threats or sanctions by judges.

Some journalists are concerned that Cohen might be a double bind: If they refuse to reveal a source, they may face sanctions from a judge; but if they do divulge it, they may face a law suit. Not to worry. If reporters refuse court orders, they face the standard punishment; if they comply, they’re protected because the breach was caused by a judge’s order.

That leaves only situations where journalists decide on their own to burn sources. If there’s a valid reason, an ethical journalist’s conscience should be clear. And if a source does sue, even an anti-media jury could see the wisdom of revealing a source if, say, a life was at stake. Journalists who choose to betray sources for lousy reasons, though, might join the Minnesota papers in the "got what they deserved" category.

There are two ways to look at Cohen’s likely effect on people who truly need a cloak of confidentiality. On one hand, they might be afraid they’ll become the next Dan Cohen, and even a successful civil suit isn’t worth the pain of public exposure. But other sources might be emboldened now that reporters can say: "I know you’re worried, but the Supreme Court says I have to keep my promise."

The simplest way of minimizing the problems Cohen may provoke: Reporters must take meticulous care every time they make promises to sources. And they must be ready to keep those promises in all but the most compelling circumstances. If Cohen accomplishes that, the dark cloud will have a silver lining.

Christopher Smith Jr.[1] found the woman he wanted in Tijuana, Mexico — and he was her.

In October 1988, Smith called the newsroom at The Times in Shreveport, LA. I took the call and didn’t quite know what to make of it. You’ve had a sex change operation and you want to talk about it? Why?

Smith, whose first name was now Christina, said she wanted to help others who felt like she once did. "They don’t have to go around and be miserable. There is hope," she told me.

But was that reason for me to write a story? I wasn’t sure. Yet what a rare interview this would be for our readers. Smith was a graduate of a local high school and was now living in Southern California. I asked her to let me call her back.

Features editor Martha Fitzgerald and I only had to talk for a few minutes before deciding to at least go ahead with an interview. After that we could decide. We informed editor Frank Sutherland what I was doing.

I arranged a meeting and interviewed the 23-year-old Smith. We also got photos. Smith told me that after graduating from high school, she moved to Texas and then to San Diego. She dressed as a woman and basically lived as one for two years before having the $5000 operation at the Hospital Clinica Quintana.

"I wanted it for my Christmas present. I saved up for it and worked hard," she said. "I have everything a woman could want." And she wasn’t at all afraid to tell me about it.

"Why would I keep it a secret? I don’t mind if people here find out because I don’t live here." But she was afraid to let me call San Diego, where she said she was six months away from completing a licensed practical nursing program. She refused to give the names of anyone there.

Her parents still lived in Shreveport, but Smith said they accepted her and still loved her. She knew they would gain in understanding in time. "They said I look nice," she said.

After the interview, I stopped by her high school alma mater and picked up a copy of her senior class yearbook. There she was: Christopher Smith Jr. The resemblance was undeniable.

Back in the newsroom, I reported in with Fitzgerald. She thought if we could verify what Smith had said about the operation, we had a story Times readers would be interested in because this was once a Shreveport resident. We would run it, but not sensationalize it.

I contacted Dr. John Ronald Brown in San Ysidro, California, and he said that he had performed the operation on Smith. "These people are females," he told me. "It is a driving force within them."

At this point, we had the interview, before-and-after photos and medical confirmation. All we were really lacking were comments from the parents.

After phoning several times and getting no answer, I drove to their house. No one was home, but across the street I found Smith’s cousin. Smith had come to see her a few days earlier.

"I can’t believe it, but it is true. I saw it with my own eyes," she said. She knew Smith had always wanted to be a woman, but she couldn’t get used to the new name: "He’ll always be Junior to me."

Fitzgerald told me to try again for the parents. I initially disagreed because the facts had been confirmed, a relative had given us some great quotes and Smith was not a minor. She argued that the parents would be affected more than anyone by this story and even if they refused to be quoted, we should let them know we were doing the story and triplecheck our facts.

I went back to their house and ended up leaving a note in the door, telling them about the story and asking them to call me. Smith’s mother finally phoned me at 10:30 PM and she was furious, saying they would be devastated if the story ran. They would not answer any questions for it. She told me flat out that we simply could not print the story on her son.

I told his mother what Smith had said about their reaction to the operation and she countered by saying they refused to see him. He was no longer welcome at their house. It was always "he." This was still their son.

It became clear we had a new problem: Smith had lied. His parents were showing no acceptance and even less understanding. I told Fitzgerald about the phone call and then repeated the essence of the conversation to Sutherland. We all wondered anew about Smith’s motive for calling us.

This person had volunteered to go on the record with a story few people would dare discuss publicly. So that others wouldn’t have to go around and be miserable? Sutherland didn’t buy it. His feeling was that Smith was trying to use our newspaper to get back at her parents for things we didn’t know about. The story would be her revenge.

Motive, though, was not the critical factor for Sutherland.

"If she lied to us about the parents’ reaction, what does that do to her credibility? We can’t trust her," he said.

For him, the lie we had caught Smith in immediately cast a shadow on everything else she had told us. And parts of her story, particularly concerning her life in California, she refused to let us verify.

And that was that. The story died in a lie. My impulse reaction was to disagree: her credibility was really not an issue because we had confirmed the operation through other sources. But when I thought about that mother’s voice — the pain, the embarrassment — I was just as glad the story never made it into print.

 

^[1] Since The (Shreveport) Times never published the story, the name of the subject has been changed.

I was finishing a six-week project on adoption when one of my main sources telephoned to say she wanted out.

Suddenly, my editors and I had big questions:

Did we have the right to print sensitive and potentially embarrassing information about an adoptive mother from rural Maine against her will? Did she have the right to stop the story after she had knowingly consented to the interview?

Deb Pelletier had been remarkably candid when I had met her more than two weeks earlier. She told how she and her carpenter-husband had paid an out-of-state baby broker thousands of dollars to find them a white infant to adopt.

Before the interview began, Deb asked me if her name would be printed. I explained that the Portland newspapers have a strict policy about using only named sources. I advised her that to avoid misunderstandings she should not tell me anything she did not want in the paper.

I was quite clear on that point because several months earlier a source had given me personal information off the record and my editors insisted that it be printed. As a result of the disagreement, the whole story was spiked.

Deb showed that she understood the ground rules by declining to reveal exactly how much money she and her husband spent on the adoption or to identify the baby broker.

She did not know that the person who arranged my interview with her had told me the broker’s name, Richard Gitelman.

I spent the two weeks after my interview with Deb completing research and writing the adoption articles. When I phoned her to check some facts, Deb provided the information without voicing any concern about the story. But she declined to have a family photograph taken.

Eighteen days after the interview, Deb phoned with her startling news: She had been uncomfortable about the story and had finally decided that only her one-year-old daughter had the right to make public the circumstances of the adoption.

The next day, Deb repeated her concerns to the project editor, Tom Ferriter. She enlisted the help of a local lawyer in her effort to stop the story.

The newspaper’s attorneys reviewed case law in the area and concluded that the Pelletiers did not have grounds for claiming invasion of privacy.

But the ethical issues could not be so easily dismissed.

I had sympathy for Deb. It did seem unfair that we could print such private information about her family without their consent.

But I was convinced that I had thoroughly explained our policy and that she knew, or should have known, what she was agreeing to.

Ordinarily, this article would have been written and printed shortly after the interview. It was only because this project took several weeks that Deb had so much time to reconsider. I knew other sources featured in the adoption project also were having second thoughts. If we allowed the Pelletiers to pullout, would we have to do the same for anyone else who asked?

John Murphy, executive editor of the Portland newspapers, made the decision to print the Pelletiers’ story. He said he did so because Deb had agreed to the interview "with her eyes wide open," and because he thought the story would educate and inform the public.

Deb was allowed to read the story before publication, an unusual but not unprecedented practice at the Portland newspapers.

At her request, the editors agreed to omit the fact that the Pelletiers had arranged the adoption through Gitelman.

Fenriter said Deb apparently believed that she had an understanding with me that the broker’s name would not be printed, and he wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt because she was inexperienced in dealing with reporters.

Deb and her lawyer threatened legal action up until the day before the story was published. They have not contacted the paper since.

I was glad to see the story in print, but I was keenly aware that Deb probably felt taken advantage of by the newspaper. The experience reinforced for me how careful reporters must be when interviewing people not normally in the news.

Could new phone technology put the confidentiality of news sources at risk?

Caller ID, the subject of many "invasion-of-privacy" arguments, has now made its way into one of the nation’s biggest daily newspapers. The feature, which allows the recipient of a call to see the number of the party calling, has raised concerns about keeping the anonymity of anonymous news sources.

The Washington Post recently installed a new high-tech system that includes Caller ID in all departments. It was a management decision that took many reporters by surprise. In fact, many news staffers didn’t realize Caller ID was on-line until it became the topic of at least one newspaper article and a television interview.

"We’d had it for a month and a half when the TV reporter first called me," said Post religion and ethics writer Laura Stepp, "And I said ‘Oh! We have Caller ID?’" Stepp added that writers with whom she’s spoken are not really concerned about it.

But when outside reporters raised questions, managing editor Leonard Downie, Jr. decided to have some in-house discussion about Caller ID. A meeting of editors and reporters produced no ethical quandaries and, so far, no staffers have brought any problems to his attention. It was generally agreed that, controversial or not, Caller ID is becoming part of the American telephone landscape. "We are not going to be unusual in having it," said Downie, "People are going to get used to it."

Downie said anonymous sources are not threatened by the system. Most tipsters call in on the Post’s main line, he said, and once that call is transferred to the reporter, the caller’s number is gone, having been replaced by the number of the phone that performed the transfer.

In case some calls are made directly to specific extensions, Post reporters have been instructed to inform the would-be anonymous source that his or her telephone number is showing up on their computer screens.

"We’re not about to seize on Caller ID as some way of exposing peoples’ identities to the outside world," said Downie. He adds that, long before there was Caller ID, sources would use pay phones because they were afraid the calls would be traced somehow. Downie said the phone company publicizes a way callers can block the function.

As of the end of April, the Post had not yet informed its readers of the new system. Media writer Howard Kurtz says he’ll probably write about it in the near future, although he considers the idea of a breach in confidentiality a "phony issue."

"It doesn’t seem to be some huge civil liberties issue," said Kurtz, "I guess I don’t see it as quite as earthshaking as some people."

Most reporters insist that there is a difference between checkbook journalism and trading information. Paying is wrong, they say, but trading is an acceptable tool for prying loose needed information.

Former New York Times reporter David Burnham, who wrote major stories on corruption in the New York City Police Department, says that there’s an "enormous symbolic difference" between paying for a story and giving a source something else. "When Serpico comes to me because The New York Times will give him protection, that looks different from money," he said.

Burnham recently made a trade in the course of his current investigation of the IRS. A source thought that Congress should take its own look at corruption in the agency, but couldn’t seem to get the right people interested. So, Burnham, who is now writing a book on the IRS, called "the right staffer on the right subcommittee" and made the introduction his source needed.

"There wasn’t any explicit understanding that we were trading information," he said, "but I certainly hope that they won’t treat me as an outsider."

Most trades are less subtle, with the reporter offering a piece of information that is helpful to the source in the hope of getting needed information in return.

Olive Talley, a reporter for The Dallas Morning News, who trades, but says that she would never buy, questions the motives of someone who asks to be paid for information. "If she has a story, why doesn’t she just tell it?" Talley asks.

The same question could be asked of a source who holds back to see if the reporter has anything to trade in return for information. Sources’ motives are often less than pure. But that doesn’t explain why it is okay for the reporter to provide goods (information) or services (protection) in exchange for information, but not cash.

The real difference is that trading is a technique that stays within reporters’ control. They decide under what conditions to withdraw promises of confidentiality or other protection. And, savvy reporters give only a little information at a time when trading, working to get what they need at the least cost. If reporters were to negotiate a cash price for information, they would lose control as soon as money changed hands.

"The key to swapping is always to give less than you get," said Talley, "A good swapper makes the other person think that they are getting something really great, but, it should be something that they could get on their own."

Reporters who trade argue that it is necessary. Others, like Philadelphia Inquirer City Editor Bill Marimow, say that reporters compromise their integrity and credibility through the trade.

Marimow has an "intuitive repulsion" when he senses that a source wants something in return for information. Trading, he says, isn’t necessary. "If you really marshal the components of good reporting, figure out how to get public documents and use a whole array of sources, you will be able to independently ferret things out and not have a potentially unhealthy symbiotic relationship with a source."

Marimow, who has won numerous awards for his investigative reporting, including the Pulitzer, said that he will, however, help "expedite people’s way to public records," if asked, but only if he is willing to do it for all interested parties. That is, he won’t tell the FBI how he put together incriminating documents unless he is also willing to tell the defense attorney. It’s important that the reporter remain neutral, he said.

When reporters choose to trade, they set up a more powerful position for themselves than usually exists in reporter-source relationships. As with any power, it can be abused. Or, the lure of an important piece of information may entice reporters to ignore the degree of their manipulation. A few guidelines can help reporters avoid some of the more obvious dangers:

1) Don’t be a catalyst. The journalistic purpose for trading information is to develop a story for public consumption. Reporters should avoid trades that bring about arrests, investigations or that otherwise make a difference in the world that wouldn’t be brought about through the published story.

Burnham’s current trade has made him into an actor rather than an observer. Trades like this can lead sources or readers to question the reporter’s neutrality.

2) Don’t trade secrets. Trade only that information that can be found or put together through public sources. Secrets can be used to manipulate people or can be turned into published material by users of the information who are less scrupulous than the reporter.

3) Don’t misrepresent the trade. Sources should know that they are being given a shortcut, not a secret.

4) Don’t let the exchange turn into extortion. Secrets should be told or kept, but not used as bargaining tools.

The need for an important piece of information, or the need to continue a good relationship with a source, may make it occasionally worthwhile for reporters to offer protection or information. But trading secrets or trading styles that turn the reporter into a blackmailer are as harmful to the practice of journalism as cash payments.

More than 13 years after Norman J. Rees carried out his threat to commit suicide upon publication of a story about his spying activities, reporter Hugh Aynesworth remembers feeling angry that the source would attempt such manipulation.

"I was willing to give him time to tell his wife, to move, and the editors agreed to give him time as well," Aynesworth said recently. "At that point, he said that if you use it, I will have to kill myself."

Aynesworth said he left the Dallas Times-Herald conference room in disgust and had no more dealings with Rees, who had just admitted to having sold secrets to the Soviets during World War II and had later worked as a double agent for the FBI.

Rees, after failing to persuade the editors to pull the story, returned to his home in Connecticut. He shot himself on the day the article was published.

Aynesworth said he was upset by Rees’s act, but said such threats can’t stand in the way of publication. If newsworthy information was withheld "every time somebody said that, what would we have in the papers?" Aynesworth asked.

Reporters and editors can’t not care about the consequences of what they write.

Judgments that a fact should be published should be made independently from the source’s reaction. But suicide threats, or less dramatic statements, can be taken into consideration in making the multitude of decisions that exists between the two poles of publish and withhold.

It doesn’t have to be a choice between a story and a life.

Judge Gary Little didn’t tell Seattle Post-Intelligencer reporter Duff Wilson that he planned to kill himself upon publication of the story exposing him as a pedophile in August 1988, but Wilson wishes that he had.

Wilson says he would have argued for holding off publication long enough "to get him help or get him committed," or would have called a crisis center or Little’s friends. "I’m not for publishing [and] damn the consequences," Wilson said.

WTMJ-TV in Milwaukee withheld the name of the ex-police officer who had molested boys. That newsroom decided that the story fulfilled its purpose without inclusion of the name; the man had said he would kill himself if it was broadcast.

Other news organizations might have argued that the pedophile’s name was indeed newsworthy. Publication of his name may have resulted in victims coming forward to press charges (thinking that they finally would be believed); other victims might have sought counseling after having the horror of their experience affirmed by the newspaper story.

Wilson observed that in Judge Little’s case, "All along, the victims had been ignored because of the judge’s power or because victims of sexual assault are often seen as consenting. They were carrying scars for 10 or 15 years."

Reasonable reporters and editors may disagree on whether information is in the public interest. But, once the fact is judged newsworthy, threats of any sort don’t change that. A news organization that withholds newsworthy information is simply not doing its job.

Threats of bodily harm cannot be ignored, however. If their lives were at stake, most journalists would let the police determine whether the threat was serious. In a like manner, reporters and editors should not take it upon themselves to decide that a suicide threat is nothing more than a desperate attempt to censor the news.

In making the publish-or-withhold decisions, journalists might ask:

A change of emphasis or the inclusion of clarifying information important to the source may prevent the loss of a job, or a reputation, or a life.

The audience needs a newsworthy fact, but often fear of competition rather than commitment to disclosure propels a story into the community now. It’s rare that information can’t be held long enough to give the source (or those close to the source) time to prepare for publication.

Threats of suicide are "extreme examples of what happens when sources feel that the newspaper isn’t treating them fairly," said Laurence Jolidon, who as metro editor of the Dallas Times-Herald was the last person from the newspaper to talk to Norman Rees.

It is up to those in the newsroom to let sources who threaten suicide know that their interests are being taken into account, he said. "You have to keep the dialogue going."

Journalists don’t need to be heartless to protect the integrity of their work, said Kerry Sipe, public editor for The Virginian-Pilot and The Ledger-Star, in Norfolk. Sipe’s approach with a half-dozen suicide threats over the last three years has been to listen to the sources’ concerns and to urge further communication between the source and newsroom before publication.

"It makes a newspaper more human if we can respond to each other’s sensitivities and still get the news out," he said.

"We wuz robbed," wails the boxer in defeat.

"We were robbed," corrects the editor in search of the inoffensive.

The words we live by are not always the words we see in print.

A football star who talks like a high school drop-out on the 11 o’clock news may speak with the precise grammar of Alistair Cooke in the morning sports section. A gritty city councilman who sprinkles conversation with an occasional "ain’t" may be a statesman declaring "aren’t" from the front page.

How far can a writer stray from the words? And just how sacred are the sentences between quotation marks?

It’s a question journalists answer daily. It’s also the question the United States Supreme Court is considering in a $10 million libel lawsuit pitting New Yorker writer Janet Malcolm against former psychoanalyst Jeffrey Masson. He accuses her of fabricating and altering quotes. She contends his charge is ludicrous.

Her lawyer insists the quotes were unchanged — other than "a word here and a word there."

"Tape-recorderese" is Malcolm’s term for halting conversation that is a thicket of ers, uhs, and fractured phrases. "Our ear takes it in as English, and only if we see it transcribed verbatim do we realize that it is a kind of foreign tongue," she writes.

For many writers, translating this foreign language means repairing bad grammar, trimming unnecessary words, boiling away excess phrases. For some editors, it means excising black dialect or a police officer’s angry curse. For some it means dreaming up the words.

In Washington, D.C., a correspondent for a top newspaper is so zealous about quoting his sources accurately that he secretly tapes their telephone conversations. At The Philadelphia Inquirer, a newswriter turned football writer indulges in regular skirmishes with his editors about whether athletes should be quoted verbatim — with fourth grade grammar violations — or spared mangled syntax. Corrections are made.

"My own opinion is that all quotes are cleaned up," said Donald Fry, associate, The Poynter Institute for Media Studies in St. Petersburg, Florida. "It works in stages. You clean up as you listen. You filter out the ‘well, you knows.’"

"The second stage is taking the notes," he said. "You clean it up again. Then when you decode it, you clean it up again. Then when you publish it certain words are carved away. There are levels and levels and levels. And we do it all with perfectly good motives."

He offers as his own example his interview with the elegant columnist Murray Kempton. In a transcript of a verbatim interview with Kempton, the writer’s precise and clean style is reduced to a banal conversation that sounds like the chatter at the local mall.

Fry’s thoughtful style of speaking also suffers under the same magnifying glass.

"I don’t think you’re too pleasant in these pieces in front of me, like the one about the woman who burned up while the cops ate their breakfast, you know. I mean . . ." Fry said to Kempton.

"Well, I mean, you know . . ." Kempton replied.

Oddly enough, there are few formal rules to guide writers’ intent on turning speech into prose.

The New York Times, for instance, has no written policy. USA Today, the Los Angeles Times and The Philadelphia Inquirer have drawn up guidelines.

But even these guidelines are elastic at the Inquirer where reporters and editors sometimes disagree on application.

Basically, the Inquirer rule says don’t change the quotes — unless it is ungrammatical. ("Minor grammatical errors are repaired in those cases when highly-desirable direct quotation would be confusing or would make the speaker look foolish.")

"This is a rule cited to alter many quotes," said Thomas Ferrick, a veteran poverty beat reporter for the Inquirer. "For instance, I’ve tried to get in a black street usage of the verb ‘to be’ — ‘I be waiting,’ ‘I be dreaming,’ and have it changed. Ditto for street contractions: ‘you gettin’ out soon?’ Ditto for ‘ain’t.’"

Dialect is a delicate issue more sensitive than simply smoothing the grammar into proper style. Editors worry about embarrassing sources or offending readers. The venerable "Elements of Style" bible for the grammarian in newsrooms simply advises: "Do not use dialect unless your ear is good."

Fry, of The Poynter Institute, recalls two cases that invoked the wrath of readers for very different reasons.

At the St. Petersburg Times, letter writers reacted angrily to a story about a black athlete who was quoted in black dialect. The writer, Fry said, had asked the athlete if he minded the quotations. He wanted to show that the athlete could shift easily between standard English and dialect. The athlete didn’t mind. Many readers did.

However, in Alaska, Eskimo Indians sought out the editorial board of a local newspaper to complain about the doctoring of their quotes, Fry said. The spare construction of their speech had been massaged into standard English. And they were irritated to see themselves white-washed in print.

David Finkel, a magazine writer for The Washington Post, said he was baffled by some readers’ perceptions about dialect or the lack of dialect.

In a freelance story for Esquire, Finkel wrote about the relationship of a black homeless woman to a white suburban woman who took her into her home. No one questioned the suburban woman’s remarks, but they did raise doubts about the homeless woman.

"After it came out some people started saying — ‘Is that an accurate quote? She sounds so good. You must have cleaned up the quotes.’ I said no. There was some kind of expectation going on that I didn’t understand. Some readers wanted me to redo quotes," he said.

For four years, dialect and foreign language have been a standard part of beat reporting for Murray Dubin, the ethnic affairs reporter for The Philadelphia Inquirer. ("I’m the guy who covers Polish polkas and the Ku Klux Klan," he explains to sources.)

In 20 years of reporting, he has fumbled with a tape recorder only three times. And he assumes that he naturally edits out the ums, dems, and uhhs.

"On this ethnic beat of mine, the only rule I have about quotes is not to shame or embarrass anyone because of their inability to speak English well," Dubin said.

"Of course, there are pieces — profiles, ethnic or neighborhood pieces, for example — where the dialect, inflections, slang, way of speaking add to a word picture," Dubin said. "However, when it is appropriate and when it is not, cannot be quantified. This is not a measurable science we’re involved in."

The judgment call is even tougher when the translation is not just a matter of turning speech to pearls of prose.

"When I deal with a translator, invariably a long, emotional answer from the Cambodian or Pole comes back through the translator as flat ‘no,’" he said.

"It never fails.

"You lose so much color and feeling when a translator is used that I generally use as few direct quotes as possible," Dubin said.

Even when the reporter is the translator there are judgment calls.

While working in Panama for The Philadelphia Inquirer, I found myself feverishly trying to take notes in Spanish and English. My tape recorder was running. My pen was racing. But still I felt some of the blood and life of the quotes were lost. Later when I switched on the recorder to listen a second time to Spanish interviews, I made the disastrous discovery that conversation was even more illusive on tape.

Voices were obliterated by the roar of an air conditioner. Words that once seemed precise in conversation were unintelligible on tape. Even worse, my credit card-sized tape recorder had a tendency to be balky at key moments.

Janet Malcolm, whose notes and tapes are at the center of the pending United States Supreme Court case, blames some of her legal problems on a tape recorder that went awry.

She spent more than 40 hours interviewing Jeffrey Masson, who sued her for $10.2 million, charging she had fabricated or changed his quotes in a two-part profile about him. Most of Masson’s interviews were on tape. But the disputed quotes were not.

"In the case of the disputed notes, my recorder was broken," she said. Distrustful of a battery-operated tape recorder, she said she used a recorder with a cord. Then, she said, during one of the interviews she tripped over that cord and broke the recorder.

"These notes exist," she said.

The notes were challenged because most of the interviews were backed up by tape. And the notes that Malcolm produced were not the actual written notes, but typed copies of a morning interview with Masson. Malcolm had lost the original notes. In district court and in the U.S. Court of Appeals, Malcolm’s use of the quotes were vindicated despite Masson’s insistence that he had never described himself as an "intellectual gigolo."

That court ruled that a journalist quoting a public figure can make up a quote without committing libel if the quote does not "alter the substantive content" of what was said.

Today, Malcolm said she has no qualms about repairing quotations that are ungrammatical or mangled. But she had learned one lesson from the years of legal battle with Masson.

"The only thing I do differently is save every scrap of paper."

Ask any sports junkie and you’ll probably get agreement. University of Kentucky basketball fans are among the most fanatical in college sports.

So reporters at the Lexington Herald-Leader knew they were onto an extremely hot story when a former UK player told them that a group of fans called "sugar daddies" were plying players with cash and other gifts in violation of NCAA rules.

There was only one problem. All the reporters had were handwritten notes. They found out that wouldn’t be enough when they contacted the player again and he back-tracked. It wasn’t really surprising. While many Kentuckians had suspected that the Wildcats’ success was built on broken NCAA rules, it was an entirely different matter to put that in print for all the world — and NCAA investigators — to see.

So Mike York and Jeff Marx, the reporters who were assigned to do some hard digging on the UK team, began strategizing with me, as projects editor, and the paper’s editor, John Carroll. Jeff and Mike said they believed players would likely come under enormous pressure to recant once they were quoted in the newspaper as admitting to improprieties.

To counter back-tracking, they wanted to tape-record all interviews. And they asked editorial permission to do so without informing interviewees.

All journalists have encountered people who are inhibited by being taped, especially when they’re saying anything controversial, and our reporters were concerned that sources wouldn’t be sufficiently forthcoming if they knew a recorder was running.

But is it legal to tape people without their consent? We checked and found that the answer is yes. There is no federal law to bar anyone from taping their own phone calls without informing the other party, as long as there’s no intention to violate anyone’s legal rights. Nor is it illegal in most states, including Kentucky.

But that still left us with another concern. Secret taping often comes across as sneaky. We didn’t want to get a reputation in the community for being tricky and find ourselves with dried-up sources and mistrustful readers.

A few weeks earlier, a Herald-Leader reporter had gotten tripped up while using a recorder concealed in his satchel. The man he was interviewing suddenly asked if he was being taped and the reporter was so panicked that he denied it.

That incident had prompted Carroll to advise the staff in writing to be up front with all sources and generally not to tape interviews without people’s knowledge.

But the basketball story presented some unusual problems. We didn’t want to be faced later with a flood of lawsuits from players who came under pressure to recant. And tapes would protect us by providing indisputable evidence of what had been said.

Would this be breaking faith with our sources? No. The key point was that people would know they were talking to us on the record and were expecting to be quoted. Tapes are merely a more complete form of notes.

So Carroll decided to make an exception to his guidelines and allow interviews — phoners only — to be taped without informing the other party. However, if any source asked whether he or she was being taped, the reporters would have to tell the truth.

Mike and Jeff started working the phones. Then, during the writing process, we discovered some added benefits of taping. We had a much richer than usual selection of quotes and the tapes enabled perfectly accurate transcriptions. To backstop the reporters, I double-checked accuracy and context by listening to every tape on which a player made an allegation of wrongdoing that we intended to publish.

The reporters eventually interviewed 33 former UK players. All but two said they knew of rules violations when they were playing. And 26 admitied that they had personally participated. Every player quoted was on tape and, with a couple of minor exceptions, all went on the record.

The resulting articles, which won us a Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting, produced an explosive reaction in Kentucky from people who believed we had betrayed "the program." We received hundreds of angry phone calls and letters, a bomb threat to our building, shots fired through our press room windows and 400 subscription cancellations. A poll revealed that fully half of our readers believed we shouldn’t have published the stories. Ironically, in the uproar, little was mentioned about the fact that we had taped people without their knowledge.

Jeff and Mike’s prediction at the outset came true when players began denying to other media outlets that they ever told us about breaking the rules. We simply responded by saying that we had cassettes sitting in a bank vault to prove us right.

Although we did have the unpleasant experience of being sued by one person over a small portion of the series, it’s clear that without the tapes we might have faced that many times over.

And the benefits of taping did not go unnoticed by the rest of our staff. If you walk through the Herald-Leader newsroom today, you’ll see a phone-taping rig on most reporters’ desks. But you won’t hear many sources being told that their interviews are being recorded.

"Hello, Tim," said the PR executive from NVR L.P. "Your story has had a profound impact on our company."

They don’t say that when they’re happy.

NVR is one of the biggest home-building companies in the country and certainly one of the most troubled. My April 22 story for The Baltimore Sun didn’t say NVR had committed any crimes or even say it was going broke. It did say that NVR had told suppliers it would slow down its bill payments because of slow housing sales, and predict that NVR’s dividend was history.

But NVR’s Doug Poretz had more on his mind than the fact that his company’s partnership units (or stock) fell 40 percent in value the week after my story ran. Poretz’s complaint was about anonymous sources.

I had used them freely without giving it much thought, and my editors hadn’t flagged me on it either. They knew the level of sources I was dealing with and trusted my abilities as a reporter.

In my story, an unidentified "investment banker" said a cyclical company like NVR was a prime candidate for a failed LBO. Sources identified only as "competitors" supplied the tidbit about payments to suppliers (one even had a copy of the letter) and characterized NVR ’s marketing ploys as desperation measures to cover its huge debt payments. With NVR involved in tough negotiations to extend a critical $250 million credit line and suffering from an already-falling stock price, NVR felt sideswiped by the publicity.

Most times, I accept the usual rationale for using anonymous sources. The occasional insight from someone who doesn’t want his or her name in the paper can add much more than the absence of the name subtracts. The anonymous source is often the only way to get the story; other times, the anonymous source simply makes the best points.

Poretz wasn’t disputing any of that; his point was that this situation was different. NVR, which employs about 2,500 people, was at a critical turning point. We both knew the company could be on the line. Customer confidence was essential for the company to survive the soft real estate cycle; bank and investor confidence was equally critical as NVR tried to fix its finances.

Considering the situation, Doug said NVR deserved better — it deserved that I be more skeptical of the motives of the people I was talking to, and that I explain the identities and motives of my sources fully to my readers.

Competitors knew NVR was having trouble, so Poretz thought they would be even more eager than usual to dump on NVR. Poretz had a point. While I trusted my sources, one or two had been notably more willing to criticize NVR than they had in the past. Along with the obvious problems of quoting competitors, the analysts had clients who either had already lost money investing in NVR or clients who could be short selling the units. Selling short is a risky investment that bets the company’s value will fall, and short sellers are well-known for leaking their views to the press in hopes of helping their investments.

All of this was still in my mind when events forced me to confront NVR’s future in a story published late in July. Since April, Standard & Poor’s had downgraded NVR’s bonds, an NVR subsidiary had missed debt payments, and NVR had said it would post a first-ever quarterly loss. It was time to question openly whether NVR would go broke.

The easy thing to do would have been to call the competitors again. They certainly think NVR might collapse. My editors wouldn’t have had a major problem with using more anonymous sources. As the Sun’s assistant business editor Michael Pollick later told me, "There’s no embargo on unnamed sources. The reader has a right to know what axe the source has to grind . . . (In the first story) you helped the reader by letting him know the sources were competitors."

But even though no one was making me change my methods, I wanted to play things safer the second time. When you are going to come out and say a company will either go broke or dramatically restructure itself to avoid going broke, it’s only right to have all your cards showing.

That’s what I did. Using on-the-record sources and documents, I showed that NVR is in terrible shape and that every way out of their situation is fraught with obstacles. They aren’t broke yet as I write this, but they are basically at the mercy of their banks.

I passed up a lot of juicy stuff for the second story; my old sources had fresh tales. But I’d made the decision that stories with special consequences — such as the possible loss of 2500 jobs — demand especially careful handling.

If NVR had committed a crime, I would have done whatever was necessary to get at the truth. But this wasn’t Watergate, NVR had just screwed up. There wasn’t enough there to justify gray-area reporting tactics.

Steering away from anonymous sources doesn’t mean writing a soft story. It does mean you have to work a little harder to get the truth. But in NVR’s kind of situation, the newsmaker has the right to expect you to do it.

I had a notebook full of psychiatrists. I had clinical literature. I had a bunch of secondhand anecdotes. All the story needed was a strong human element to build on.

I thought I had found it when the woman poured out her private agony to me in an hour-long telephone interview.

The problems began when she tried to take it all back.

The story was about obsessive-compulsive disorder, a mental condition whose victims feel compelled to repeat senseless behaviors — typically variations of counting, cleaning and checking — until their lives are consumed by them. I was writing it for BUFFALO, the Sunday magazine of The Buffalo News.

I got "Betty’s" name from the Obsessive-compulsive Disorder Foundation, to which she had written for help. I called and explained my story, saying I hoped it would help to inform OCD victims of treatments and support groups. Betty seemed receptive, but jittery.

When I called a week later, she hesitantly agreed to an interview. Once we got going, it became obvious that the chance to talk was a welcome catharsis.

Betty was a "checker" — she could never be sure of anything. Driving her car, she would find herself cruising again and again down the same street, checking whether she had hit anyone. She pestered her family pointlessly — "Are you sure those potato chips are safe to eat?" She told me she had eaten a cookie with lunch, and was terrified that it had gotten poisoned.

All this from a woman who was once a nurse, who obviously was intelligent and rational but was consumed by her fears. I promised to send her a copy of the article and went home satisfied.

A few days later, she called collect. "I’ve been having second thoughts about this," she said in that same nervous-energy voice. "I’m not sure I want to be part of your article." I reminded her that she would remain anonymous, that her story might save others some pain. And I got her off the phone — fast.

A week later, she called again. "I’ve finally decided that it would be better if I didn’t do this," she said. "I’m sorry if I wasted your time." Her doctor, she said, had advised her to avoid stress; she had a bleeding ulcer, and she was becoming obsessed with replaying the interview in her mind. So she wanted to take it back.

That’s not how it works, I began to explain. What’s on the record stays on the record.

"No one ever told me that," she said. She had a point. I repeated my arguments about how this article would help people with OCD, but she was adamant: She wanted out. I told her I’d call her back.

The options were clear: Use the material against her wishes, or kill it and approach the story in a different way.

I was plenty tempted to go with what I had — probably 25 inches of true pathos and great quotes. And after all, hadn’t I given Betty a week to decide whether to do the interview? That seemed more than fair.

There was another reason to use it. One hook for the story was a new anti-OCD drug called Anafranil. But the drug wasn’t going to help everyone, and Betty was a case in point. One of her obsessions focused on anything she ingested, including medication; a prescription would only fan her fears.

I half expected the editor of the magazine, Carl Herko, to say I should use Betty’s material. Instead, he argued the opposite.

"Private people deserve their privacy," he said. Those who don’t routinely deal with the press, he pointed out, may not be aware of the rules we work under.

One other factor complicated the situation: Betty’s mental state. It was evident that she wasn’t "of sound mind." Diminished mental capacity would invalidate a legal contract; should the same hold true for the implied contract between source and reporter?

My decision came down to weighing the certainty of causing Betty further distress against the likelihood that her story would benefit other OCD sufferers. For sheer voyeurism, it couldn’t be beaten.

But there were other ways to do the story. I called her, then spiked my notes. She couldn’t thank me enough.

My story did get written and published. It was readable enough, if a little lacking in the drama that Betty could have added.

But by not using her story, I tied up some loose ends. I don’t like the idea that I might have brought more trouble into the life of this troubled woman. Had I used her story, I would have wondered for a long time what good I had brought about — and what pain.

Klein’s Forest Manor was a 200-bed single-room occupancy hotel in the borough of Staten Island, one of many large boarding houses that had developed in New York City to house the thousands of patients who had been released from state psychiatric centers.

As a reporter with the Staten Island Advance (daily circulation 80,000), I was writing often about Forest Manor whose problems were duplicated in hundreds of single-room occupancy (SRO) hotels throughout the city.

My ethical dilemma arose after one of Forest Manor’s residents, a 25-year-old Brooklyn man, committed suicide by jumping off the building’s roof. The next day, following up on the story, I arranged an interview at the facility. When I arrived, the manager brought me to a room to meet a case worker from a local psychiatric center where the victim had been treated.

The social worker told a fascinating and insightful story. The victim, a product of a broken home, had experienced psychiatric problems early in his teens and had been in and out of hospitals. When both his parents, who were quite elderly, moved to Florida, he was referred to Forest Manor. The day before his death, the victim’s father visited and they quarreled. The next day at a clinic, he stuck himself in the stomach with a blunt object.

The victim told a psychiatrist he was confused, but the psychiatrist concluded and noted on his records, "Patient is not suicidal." The social worker, to my surprise, handed me the case file and pointed to the psychiatrist’s handwritten note that the patient was not suicidal. The same day the psychiatrist drew this conclusion, the young man killed himself.

Perplexed, I asked the social worker how the psychiatrist could have reached his conclusion. "The victim was taking considerable medication," she replied, "and this should have stabilized him." She told me the exact dosage.

It was only then that I became suspicious. Reporters are rarely — except in court cases or with an obvious leak of information — allowed to see medical and psychiatric records. "Why are you telling me all this?" I asked.

You are a social worker, she said, compiling information for a hospital review, aren’t you?

I turned to the manager of Forest Manor who admitted with a shrug that he had told her I was someone else. He wanted to make my job easier, he explained. He had other motives, however. If the public knew about the problems of Forest Manor’s residents, maybe they would support the operators’ efforts to allow nurses — at the state’s expense — to work in the facility.

My source was understandably upset. She asked that I not use any of the information I had just gotten. If I did, she said, she might be fired. At the least, it was a serious breach of confidentiality and professional ethics. Had she known I was a reporter, she said she wouldn’t have consented to an interview but would have referred me to a public relations officer who most likely would have given me no information.

I, too, was angry because I had conducted a good-faith interview, thinking we were legitimately on the record. I had not misidentified myself, conducting the interview with my "reporter’s notebook" in full view. And the information I had received was compelling.

Normally, ethical considerations prevent a reporter from taking information under false pretenses. Moreover, reporters who have not identified themselves might get information that is unreliable. Sources speak differenfly on the record than they might, say, to a friend with whom they are having a drink.

How then did I resolve the dilemma?

I had written about boarding houses for four years. These poorly-supervised facilities were inappropriately located in residential neighborhoods and they were just becoming the focus of serious public policy discussions as to how — and even whether — they should be regulated.

My story, I was convinced, was important. It would contribute to a larger debate about this new industry. The bottom line for me was that the public’s need for information outweighed my source’s desire for protection from identification. Moreover, the two needs were not mutually exclusive.

I did not consult with any editor since I felt this was a reporter-source decision and since the Advance’s editors were generally uninvolved in the routine of daily news gathering. (The overworked city editor was supervising 15 reporters.)

I proposed a compromise. I would agree not to attribute this information to my source and I would not use any references that might identify her. However, I would attribute the psychiatrist’s diagnosis to a note on the victim’s case file and I would decide what information to use from our interview. She agreed, and the story appeared the next day on page one, sad testimony to a failed family and an inept mental health system.

In hindsight, I should have consulted with an editor to get a second opinion on the matter. I might also have tried to get the information confirmed from other sources. There was no doubt about its accuracy, but if I could have gotten it from other sources I would not have jeopardized my original source’s job status. (She never was suspected as the source of the story, however.)

Maintaining the trust of sources is important, but in a situation where a reporter has not acted dishonestly in obtaining information, I’m convinced that the obligation is less to the source than to the public.

Breaking a promise for anonymity is always a painful, ethically dangerous decision for a newspaper. It becomes excruciating when the person being revealed is a 5-year-old girl with AIDS.

In 1987, The Tampa Tribune published the name of Eliana Martinez, a child involved in a highly publicized struggle for entry into the public school system. The Tribune made the difficult decision despite impassioned entreaties from Eliana’s mother, who feared her daughter - who is mentally retarded - would be mercilessly harassed.

In writing the story, I was forced to break a long-standing promise to keep Eliana’s identity a secret - and found myself thrust into a debate pitting an innocent child’s safety against the perceived media manipulation of her mother.

Rose Martinez adopted Eliana as a baby from her native Puerto Rico, where the child had contracted the AIDS virus from blood transfusions. Through intense love and attention at her mother’s Florida home, Eliana evolved from a mute, staring vegetable to an active, laughing child - though one without the ability to speak, read or control her bowels.

With fierce resolve, Rosa Martinez entered into a fight with the school board in Tampa to have Eliana placed in special-education classes - the only place, she felt, her daughter would reach her full potential. The school board, fearing Eliana’s lack of toilet training would pose a health threat to other children and teachers, denied the request.

Eliana’s mother took her struggle to the Tribune, giving a reporter an exclusive interview on one condition: Her daughter’s full name and address be kept a secret, at least until the case made it to federal court.

Rosa Martinez’s crusade attracted considerable attention from local print and broadcast news organizations, all of whom followed the Tribune’s lead and did not identify Eliana - even when she was paraded before a public school board meeting.

In the midst of the battle, I took over the education beat from the reporter who had broken Eliana’s story. At the time Rosa Martinez, having exhausted all her options with the school board, was about to plead her case before a state hearing officer.

An administrative hearing is not a legal proceeding. There is no jury or judge, although testimony and evidence are presented. It was the job of the hearing officer to give a second opinion of the school board’s decision to bar Eliana from school.

Rosa Martinez, always accessible to the media, agreed to open the hearing to the public - an unusual move in a case involving a minor. Before the hearing, she reminded me that Eliana’s full name was to be kept secret for now.

But Lawrence McConnell, who was then assistant managing editor and as new to the case as I was, demanded the child’s identity be published.

His reason was simple: Rosa Martinez had opened the case to the public, therefore, anyone who wanted to could attend the hearing and learn the child’s name. McConnell also believed the mother had taken too much control over the media in an attempt to further her own agenda.

It was with a heavy heart that I called Rosa Martinez to tell her that the family’s name would be revealed in the next morning’s paper. She begged me not to print it. I told her - as did a slew of editors up the line - that there was no choice.

While I agreed with the editor that the woman had exercised control, perhaps too much control, over news coverage, I wondered whether my paper was justified in flexing its First Amendment muscle in a case involving a sick child.

The story was about Eliana, not her mother. It was unlikely that the child was aware of what was going on around her. Didn’t her safety and privacy outweigh the public’s right to know? ( Shortly after the Tribune article was published, other media started using Eliana’s full name. )

In addition, it was her mother’s cooperation that made it possible in the first place for us to cover the story. Should we risk at this point losing her goodwill even if it meant missing out on future stories?

By far the most troubling aspect was the broken promise. The Tribune had agreed to wait until the case arrived in federal court before publishing Eliana’s name. Was it possible that Rosa Martinez might have decided not to bring the case to court, in order to protect her daughter’s privacy? By jumping the gun, we made the decision for her.

I am still troubled by the newspaper’s decision. There is a special trust between reporter and source that cannot be violated if we are to maintain our integrity. But perhaps the responsibility for this breach lies with both reporter and source: The reporter made a mistake by promising too much in pursuit of a good story. Rosa Martinez made a mistake by asking for too much in pursuit of her goal.

If the subject of our story had said she was seduced and betrayed, instead of misquoted, she would have been right.

On Jan. 3, 1984, the Valley News in West Lebanon, New Hampshire, published a story about the first baby of 1984 born in the area. A staple of community journalism, it began as most such stories do: with a rosy account of the facts surrounding the birth as told by the mother during an interview in her hospital bed. Then, about six inches into the story, it said:

"Tammy was looking forward to taking Daniel home to meet Steven today. Steven was one of the reasons she decided to get pregnant, even though she’s single.

"’Steven needs a younger brother,’ Tammy said yesterday. ‘He’s so hyper. And I figured I don’t have anything else to do. I’m not married and I don’t work and I love kids, so why not have a second baby?’

"Tammy has no current man in her life. She lives upstairs from her parents, receives welfare checks and wouldn’t change the situation for anything.

"’I like being a single mother. You learn to do more for yourself, because you can’t count on other people to do things for you.’"

John Fensterwald, the local news editor at the time, was surprised at Tammy’s candor. The reporter, Sallie Graziano, assured him that Tammy was pleased to be so featured. The story was edited and given a headline ("New Year’s Baby Gives Mom Happy Start"). As assistant local news editor, I gave it a quick second reading. We had given the story fairly routine treatment.

Our readers did not, however. Within a few days, letters to the editor began to arrive. Angry letters. For the next four months, we published letters about this story nearly every week.

Most letter writers saw the girl as too comfortable in her sense of entitlement; they cited her as proof of what they had long suspected. This letter was typical:

"I never thought I would see the day when someone would admit in black and white, on the front page of a newspaper, that they loved sitting home having babies and not working while the welfare check comes rolling in. We all know many people do it. I just hadn’t seen anyone have the gall to admit it in print before."

Within a few weeks, the conservative radio commentator Paul Harvey, as outraged as our letter writers, broadcast Tammy’s story nationwide.

Soon afterward, Tammy, as well as some of her relatives, contacted the newsroom. Her life had become a living hell, and she was afraid to leave her apartment because of the abuse she encountered on the street. She wanted a retraction, she said, because we had misquoted her.

Tammy lashed out at us in the only way she knew: by contesting the facts. She had probably never thought to say we had betrayed her implicit trust — a charge we could not have dismissed so easily.

One or two letter writers criticized the newspaper, not the mother:

" . . . my initial reaction was not one of disgust with the baby’s mother, but with your staff’s lack of moral consciousness. You took advantage of someone’s frankness and purposefully put into print an article that you must have known would only humiliate her in the end . . ."

Take out "purposefully", and substitute "should" for "must" and that writer was on target.

By this time, the story had become the focus of an ongoing newsroom debate. Some editors argued that the story’s accuracy was enough to warrant publication and that it represented a viewpoint readers were interested in and entitled to read.

Others said we should have omitted all the material about welfare, or that the reporter should have given her a sort of Miranda warning about what she was saying. Obviously, it was too late for that.

We finally decided that, at the least, our story’s sprightly tone could have made the mother sound too cavalier. A different reporter tried to contact Tammy to offer to write about how the story had affected her. That would give her a chance to describe any plan she might have (or might invent, if she didn’t already have one) for a more productive life than the one implied in our story. But Tammy never answered the reporter’s messages, and we never heard from her again.

The reporter in this case intended no seduction and betrayal. She didn’t approach Tammy the way reporters sometimes approach hardened media manipulators, hoping to get them to drop their guard. Tammy didn’t have to let her guard down. It wasn’t up.

No, here the danger lay in this combination: a naive interviewee, susceptible to the flattery implicit in the undivided attention of a friendly interviewer; a seasoned reporter, for whom showing interest is a professional demeanor implying no special sympathy; and editors who did not anticipate the public outrage that was so hurtful to Tammy.

Would we have published the story anyway, if we had foreseen the reaction? Perhaps, but I doubt it.

We often assume that people who become story subjects by accident are as sophisticated about the press as cagey public officials. Usually they aren’t. They trust us to keep them from hurting themselves, and we shouldn’t betray that trust.

"Wow! I can’t believe he’s really telling me this!"

All reporters have had sources say surprising things. But what happens when the source doesn’t understand that he’s putting himself at risk? What do journalists owe vulnerable sources?