A new journalism experiment: Source blocks

Ian Lamont — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 10:03:55 -0800

I've been conducting an experiment on The Industry Standard since late October. After each story that I write, I add a short block of text that identifies all of the sources I used to conduct research. It looks something like this:

Sources cited, referenced, or consulted: Gambling911, poker-strategy.org, financialservices.house.gov, pokernewsdaily.com, thomas.loc.gov, worldgamblingnews.com, University of Pittsburgh School of Law/Journal of Law and Technology Policy (law.pitt.edu), Brian Cullingworth (gambling911.com).

In the above case, less than half of these sources were directly quoted or linked. The remainder helped me research the topic, clarify issues, and check facts, but they were not mentioned in the story itself.

There are a few things that prompted me to start adding a source block at the end of each story I write. My main concern: Don't readers have a right to know where journalists are getting their facts, or how they are developing their angles and opinions?

In the academic world, students and scholars have very strict standards for citations. Some areas of government and industry are also very careful about documenting sources of information. But when it comes to journalism, the only sources most readers are ever made aware of are those which are quoted or referred to in the body of the article. The migration of print media outlets to the Web has improved the ability of writers to hyperlink certain resources, but many readers never click through to find out what the source is. There is no easy way to tell what sources were used to write an article.

Another reason for adding the source block is my long-standing concern over the influence of the PR industry and their clients. When I see articles about Hillary Clinton's job prospects suddenly popping up like mushrooms after a heavy rain without any apparent source other than "talk" or "rumors," I wonder if that talk originated from someone working for Senator Clinton. Among technology publications and blogs, the PR onslaughts are easy to spot, if you know where to look -- a flurry of Techmeme links to an apparent non-story is a dead giveaway that someone's PR agency has been at work on journalists and well-known bloggers. But few will admit that they have been prompted to write a story after being approached by PR pros -- it suggests they've been spoon-fed information by biased sources. Still, don't readers deserve to know?

The third factor that prompted me to include the "sources" block is the knowledge that many writers use a range of sources to conduct research, check facts and ascertain people's opinions. Journalists and bloggers are sometimes taken to task for not doing enough research or regurgitating press releases, but I think it's important for readers to understand that most professional writers do use multiple sources to research articles and commentary. While listing all of the sources can reveal additional biases on the part of the source (such as an official spokesperson) or the writer (he reads that liberal rag?), it can also demonstrate to readers that more than one source is being used to check information or provide a range of views.

The final thing that prompted me to start this experiment was Wired's transparency issue, which came out in March of 2007. One of the themes that Wired explored was how PR and journalists work together to produce a story. Included in the issue was the fascinating backstory (well, fascinating to me) about an incident involving Wired, Microsoft, and Microsoft's PR agency, Waggener Edstrom. I was disappointed that Wired didn't continue the experiment beyond a few backstory sidebars from time to time, but I could understand why: Doing so would require a lot of additional work.

That got me wondering: Was there a way to provide transparency without writing a sidebar for each article? An obvious model was academic-style endnotes. But these also take a lot of work to prepare and format, and aren't very readable.

In the end, I decided to prepare a simple, easy-to-read list of sources consisting of a single paragraph with comma-separated sources. I've found it takes just a minute or two to prepare -- I usually build the list as I am writing, or sometimes check my browser history to verify what I've looked at.

It's not perfect. The most obvious shortcoming is the absence of hyperlinks to specific Web pages not mentioned in the body text. Adding links would not only help readers, but would also notify external sources that they are being referenced by The Industry Standard.

However, I have two good reasons for not doing this: The first is it would take too much additional time to manually add the links, and potentially dissuade others from using source blocks. In addition, having too many hyperlinks in a story sometimes signals search engines and automatic news aggregators that the page in question is not an article or a piece of commentary. This can reduce Web traffic, which would be problematic -- most news sites depend on display advertising, and we need all the help we can get in terms of referrals from Google, Techmeme, and other algorithm-driven websites.