Citing Sources in Journalism - and Other Nonacademic
Writing
In “Journalism without
Scandal,” a report posted Jul. 17, 2003
to Poynteronline, eighteen journalists of national standing debate basic
practices in their profession. The
following are some core principles excerpted from their discussion. These
citation guidelines can be adapted to other nonacademic genres, such as
proposals, letters, newsletter articles, and creative nonfiction essays.
“Our responsibility to the reader
is to make clear where we got our information.”
Regarding ANONYMOUS SOURCES (sources who do not want to be identified), these
journalists agree that:
·
We should weigh [an anonymous] source’s reliability and disclose
to readers the source’s potential biases.
·
The more specific we can be in describing the source in the
story, the better.
·
Anonymous sources should not be used for personal attacks,
accusations of illegal activity, or merely to add color.
·
The source must have first-hand knowledge.
Regarding ATTRIBUTABLE SOURCES (sources writers identify – persons or books for example),
the group explains:
Journalists have the following options for clarifying the
sources of their information:
1. “Use deft
textual attribution”
2. Provide
“detailed editor’s notes”
3. And (less
commonly) utilize “the newspaper equivalent of ‘footnotes.’”
1. Using Deft Textual Attribution
Signaling
of sources needs to be more thorough in nonacademic styles than in many
academic styles because academic citation can rely in part on parentheticals,
footnotes, and a list of references to give full credit to sources.
Here’s
a sample of careful textual attribution of a source, excerpted from Malcolm
Gladwell’s 2007 New Yorker article, “Open Secrets”:
“The
political scientist Alexander George described the sequence of V-1 rocket
inferences in his 1959 book "Propaganda Analysis," and the striking thing
about his account is how contemporary it seems.”
Notice
Gladwell’s thoroughness and specificity when introducing the author and the
book while also leading into his own perspective on what readers of his article
should understand about the book.
This
elongated in-text signaling method could be equally appropriate in an academic
style such as MLA, but here it is an example of responsible journalism allowing a reader to track this source with
little difficulty despite the magazine article genre’s lack of a works cited
page.
2. Providing Detailed Editor’s Notes
Editor’s notes
placed before a story can be used to explain the sources and methods used by
the writer(s) if it is impractical to fully attribute each source directly
within the text. Here’s an example from “How Five Lives Became
One Horror When Terror Struck the Twin Towers”, an article from The Wall Street Journal.
This
article is based on interviews with more than 125 witnesses to the Sept. 11
attack on the
3.
Providing Footnotes (less
common)
Although not yet a
common practice, some highly acclaimed narrative news stories have adapted the
practice of footnoting in order to fully account for sources of information
that might not be clear from in-text attributions.
The same Wall Street Journal story has footnotes at the end. Here is an excerpt from the
source list, but go to the article’s link above to see how this works in the
full piece:
Note on Sources
Moises Rivas:
Handwritten note to Mr. Rivas: reconstructed by Windows on the World banquet chef Ali Hizam from notes written to himself in his notebook.
Mr.
Rivas's clothing, phone call: interviews with wife, Elizabeth Rivas, and her
daughter-in-law, Linda Barragan, who saw him leave home and who later talked to him on the phone.
In
academic and nonacademic writing alike, the bottom line is that writers need to
be responsible -- to both their readers and their sources -- by clearly showing
where information originated.
--
--Attribution examples prepared by Collie Fulford for the