source-protection

name	Source Protection
description	Take information on terms, record them so the whole newsroom honours them, and publish without identifying anybody.
category	Editorial

Source Protection

The terms are a promise made by the newsroom, not by the reporter. A source identified by an illustration or a translated detail is identified just as thoroughly as one named in the text.

When to use

• Anybody provides information on any condition.
• A story involves somebody who could face consequences for having spoken.

Steps

1. Agree the terms explicitly and in their words — on the record, on background, off the record — and check they mean the same thing by them that you do. They frequently do not.
2. Record them immediately on sources, with the date and who agreed them. Terms that live in one reporter's memory are terms the newsroom will breach by accident.
3. Name the interest. What the source gains if the story runs. Everybody has one; not writing it down does not remove it.
4. Corroborate independently. A protected source's account is a lead until a second source or a document supports it.
5. Audit for identifying detail before publication — in the text, the illustration, the metadata, the social card and every translation. The detail that identifies somebody is rarely their name.
6. Reassess reliability afterwards. A source who turned out to be wrong must be recorded as such, by somebody other than the person they charmed.

Output

A sources row carrying the terms, the interest and the reliability, and a publication-ready story with an explicit note of what was removed to protect them. Anything contested goes to the operator before it is published.