A curious little conversation flared up in the last 24 hours about the journalistic conventions surrounding the term “off the record.”
On Wednesday morning The New York Times’ Nick Bilton, lead writer for the Bits Blog, tweeted out this nugget:
Bilton responded with another tweet, informing his followers that his source understood he would be reporting the information without attribution. Then everybody else weighed in. And few agree about what “off the record” means.
But that’s OK. Good reporters do what Bilton did. They clarify the terms of engagement with their source. Journalists who insist on following a hard and fast set of rules will find themselves in trouble on this topic. NYU has a great J-school, but their handbook is overly rigid on this and will lead reporters astray. It doesn’t allow for the confusion throughout the profession and the general public over this term.
Even if everyone in a single newsroom agrees on what “off the record” means, that doesn’t change the fact that the rest of the population doesn’t share a common understanding of the term. And now we live in a world where significant journalism grows in a variety of gardens, including the traditional professional newsroom as well as the vast Fifth Estate (all the rest of the world doing journalism). The terms are getting even murkier. Therefore, it’s always the writer’s duty to clarify the terms with a source.
Some sources deal with lots of reporters, who could be operating with different definitions. Some sources have never worked with a reporter and their only reference point is what they’ve read in crime novels. That’s why every reporter has to make sure he and his source have a common understanding, no matter what the handbook says.
