The inner workings of journalism

By: Michelle Anstett
Editor-in-chief

Last week, “The Courier” ran a couple of stories which included both anonymous sources and collective staff efforts in the composition of the articles. As a result, many of our readers have brought forward questions as to our motives for doing this.

There are many things which journalists do that confuse those in the wider world. The Associated Press tells news writers to put quotation marks around book, movie and play titles instead of in italics, to use widely accepted, not necessarily “politically correct” terms in writing and not to put a comma after the second-to-last item in a series, such as in this sentence. We are told to only capitalize the first word, as well as proper nouns, in our headlines. We abbreviate state names, such as Illinois, differently than the US Postal Service, but our abbreviations are all standardized.

It’s not just the way in which we format things in the newspaper which distinguishes us from everyone else. We do things in order to protect our integrity and credibility as journalists, and also to protect our sources and maintain the public’s trust in us as the proverbial “voice of the people.”

In the article entitled “Students: beware a scam,” the byline said “Courier Staff.” The majority of the article was written by Sports Editor Ian Van Anden, but several key points were changed in both the editing of the article and as new information became available after the article was finished by him. When those things were changed, the editorial staff felt it best not to put words into Ian’s mouth, especially words which could possibly be seen as controversial, so we changed the byline. This way, if anyone took offense to things which were said within the article, we could all take responsibility for what was said and the heat did not fall solely upon any one person, especially someone who may or may not have written the controversial statement.

A collective effort, “Courier Staff” byline was also used in the article “Guerilla versus civil discourse,” but for a few different reasons. One simple reason is that this article was truly a collective effort: we sent some reporters out to interview deans Masood and Jakoubek, others researched the activities which were done as part of this group’s campaign, others wrote different sections of the article and we all had some hand in interpreting what was said in the document slipped underneath the publications room door. In addition, we wanted to make this a collective effort as a way to protect our anonymous sources. If we did not put a specific writer’s name to the story, that person could not be singled out and pressured by anyone to give up the names of the sources. Also, making the story a collective effort was a way to protect ourselves. If no one person was responsible for the content of the story, no one person could be held responsible for what was said in that story.

In that same story, we featured comments from anonymous sources. Most people do not understand why we use sources who refuse, for one reason or another, to reveal their identities. However, if it weren’t for a journalist’s rights to protect the anonymity of sources, the Watergate scandal would never have been broken by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of “The Washington Post.” These men faced extreme pressure, both professional and legal, to reveal the identity of Deep Throat, but they invoked their rights as journalists and Deep Throat’s identity was not revealed until 2005.

Journalists must be seen as people the public can trust. When a person sees something he or she thinks is newsworthy, that person must be willing to take that story to the press. The press must be seen as an entity which can be trusted to bring forth and protect the vested interests of the people, and not as something which cannot be trusted and will expose those who wish to look out for the public interest, even when it’s dangerous for them to speak out. We must be willing and able to protect the rights and identity of those who step bravely forward and give us information which we would not have found out otherwise.

As members of the press, we do things differently than everyone else, and it simply takes a bit of explanation and understanding on both our part and the part of our readers in order to make everyone happy.

The staff of “The Courier” would like to thank our readers for respecting the rights which we possess as journalists, and we would ask for your understanding in these matters for the future.