Your Friends and Sources

The Village Voice's Nick Sylvester won himself admission to The Disgraced Journalists Club earlier this month when he admitted to fabricating a key passage of his otherwise dubious cover story on pick-up artists and counter pick-up artists in the alt-weekly's March 1-8 issue. But what separates Sylvester's cardinal sins from those of more odious peers like Jayson Blair, Stephen Glass or Janet Cooke is that his fabrications are apparently embedded in fact.

The scene in question, which concludes the piece, briefly chronicles the exploits of three television writers "who had flown in from L.A. for the weekend" to ply their best pick-up lines on the Lower East Side. The three were named "Steve Lookner, DC, and Vali" (inexplicably, they were renamed "Steve Lucien, DC, and Vic" in the online version of the story), and it was Lookner calling out Sylvester's faux-first person account that brought down the entire story. But as Sylvester would confess and all parties would later confirm, the scene was ostensibly based in fact — "DC" and "Vic" had fed him the supposedly true details he used to compose their fake night on the town. But who were DC and Vic?

A little digging by mediabistro's interns (and by the sleuths over at Gawker) revealed that DC and Vic were most likely Danny Chun and Vali Chandrasekaran, who at the very least were contemporaries of Sylvester at Harvard and the Harvard Lampoon. (Lookner, who is a decade older than all three, is also an alum of both.) While Sylvester and Lookner did not respond to requests for comments, it would appear that Sylvester did not, in fact, perform a feat of cultural anthropology. Instead, he just bullshitted with some friends who in the end refused to cover for him.

Using one's friends as sources to disastrous effect happens more often that one might think. A year ago, Tampa Tribune reporter Brad Smith was ousted from that paper after fabricating a third-person story based on his personal exploits. A subsequent investigation of his stories and sourcing revealed numerous sources with "social ties" popping up in his accounts, including one woman who told investigators that she had given Smith permission to attribute to her any quotes he needed to fabricate. Once a reporter strikes that deal, it's a quick slip to Stephen Glass territory, Glass having once recruited his own brother to pose as one of his imaginary sources.

"Whenever I run into a fabrication charge, it's interesting how often it goes hand-in-hand with quoting your friends and family as sources," says Kelly McBride, ethics group leader for the Poynter Institute, a training center for professional journalists. "The practice is as wide as you can imagine it. There are some people who are always quoting their friends, and there are some who are disciplined enough to never go there."

But is this really a case where if there's smoke, there's fire? Speaking as a professional journalist whose peer group is almost entirely composed of other journalists: What's wrong with a little help from our friends?

FRIENDS ARE LIKE OPINIONS...
Using one's friends as sources — not to fabricate scenes or prop up dubious suppositions, but just as your proverbial man or woman-on-the-street, a non-expert — occupies an ethical gray area. While The New York Times takes a dim view on the practice and addresses the issue in its ethics handbook, Hearst Magazines, for example, has no clear-cut policy and is perfectly willing to entertain the idea on a case-by-case basis. Mediabistro's own Claire Zulkey led a debate on this subject last summer on this site's message boards, leading readers to chime in with long lists of conditional statements about when it is and is not appropriate to quote your friends. But the whole topic is sufficiently radioactive that when I sought the counsel of my own friends, they were unanimous in their desire to speak off the record.

Just to be clear, I am talking about a very narrow practice here. I'm not thinking of the great tradition of logrolling in our time, where the readers are usually oblivious to the writer's personal and professional reasons for fawning over the subject. I'm talking about the non-random random sources who buttress the sort of trends stories and soft features that pop up in every issue of Cosmo, or Glamour, or even The New York Times' Thursday and Sunday Styles sections. (Tell me: What should the criteria for expert sourcing on Paul Bunyan-style beards be, exactly?)

Poynter's McBride (who is not a friend of mine, I feel I should point out), offers a few good reasons why quoting your friends is a bad idea. One is the hit to your credibility among those who do figure out the inside joke being perpetuated, including your editors. Another is the conflicting interests of telling the whole truth and nothing but the truth, and making your friends look good, "everything from cleaning up their bad grammar to ignoring things which might appear unseemly," i.e. whitewashing.

To that short list, I'd also add that quoting your friends and family in stories betrays an ultimately cynical view of the world, one in which the people of your community — your readers, essentially — are both interchangeable and monochromatic at the same time. One of the best descriptions of friendship I've heard is that our friends essentially act as self-affirming mirrors, reflecting back to us an image of ourselves that we like to see. By that token, quoting one's friends in stories is an ultimately narcissistic enterprise.

"It's endemic of the fact that we tend to interview people who look like us and talk like us," says McBride. "And if the cynic finds himself talking to the same people over and over for that reason, then there's something wrong with their sourcing."

Tara Weiss is a staff writer on the business desk of the Westchester Journal News in White Plains, N.Y. (and she's also a friend of my editor). Her beat frequently entails writing the sort of personal finance stories she could easily source to her friends, but won't. "I think it's always tempting," she says, "because it makes life so much easier if you do. But if you go out to the mall, or to Starbucks and talk to strangers, it's amazing what you can find. You need a diverse source pool to hear these things, and while I like to think I'm friends with a diverse group of people, I'm probably not."

I have a confession I'd like to make. At the beginning of this year, I wrote a story for AdvertisingAge (where I'm an editor-at-large) about the scintillating, user-friendly topic of how different generations consume media. Upon sitting down to churn out a thousand or so words on the topic, I discovered I was at a loss for an anecdotal lead that would condense and personify my findings in one neat little package. Could I think of any families with that description? I could, actually: my girlfriend's.

And so I put them in the piece. Did it hurt the story? Not at all; I'd like to think it was a fairly by-the-numbers lead that put all of the factoids behind it in perspective. Did it hurt the readers? Once again, not at all. Consider AdAge's audience of advertising and media executives. Any family lacking close ties to the industry is equally objective, as far as they're concerned. Did I tell my editor, Dan Lippe, they were my girlfriend's family? I did, and we had a good chuckle over it. And we did again when I called to tell him about this story. He had no problems with it then, and he still doesn't. And his reasoning is also mine: While I may have used sources I had personal ties to, I didn't use them to advance a thesis lacking in factual support. In fact, I did the opposite — I used them precisely because they matched up well with what the hard data suggested. As for any charges of taking the easy way out, to that I say... mea culpa.

I didn't whitewash her family, either. But I didn't make my own life any easier when I quoted my girlfriend's sister using an expletive to succinctly describe her attitude toward television, igniting a mini-scandal I was certain would torpedo my repeat appearance at Thanksgiving this year. That particular storm blew over, but it doesn't always. A freelancer friend of mine once quoted her friend's brother, only to see his anger over the story come back to bite her. "I think he didn't like, in the end, being quoted," she says. "He had never been interviewed by a journalist before. It wasn't even a negative story. But the point is, he was so angry it actually damaged the friendship. So I actually steer away from using people I know because I don't want to get caught again in that trap."

SOURCE OR FOE?
Even if we all agree that using friends as sources is a trap (and obviously, I have my doubts) how do we avoid falling into it? Poynter's McBride suggests a double policy of establishing a clear rule and then implementing some form of enforcement — fact-checking, in other words. In practice, most newspapers and magazine seem to have one and not the other. The New York Times, for example, attempts to grapple with the issue in its published ethical guidelines. "Scrupulous practice requires that periodically we step back and take a hard look at whether we have drifted too close to sources we deal with regularly," reads one passage. "The acid test of freedom from favoritism is the ability to maintain good working relationships with all parties to a dispute." But as Jayson Blair and Judith Miller have proved, the vetting of sources and their relationships to reports may prove to be near impossible in a daily news environment.

Another friend of mine who is an editor at a monthly men's magazine says that while her employer lacks a stated policy, she takes the time to quiz writers about their sources and that sussing out personal relationships is explicitly part of the fact-checking process.

And at Hearst Magazines, spokeswoman Elizabeth Dye said: "While we don't have a corporate policy on this, our editors make every effort to use the most reliable and credible sources available on a particular subject, regardless of whether there is a personal relationship or not." In other words, they do it on a case-by-case basis over there. And when the magazines in question include multi-million reader juggernauts like Cosmo, where the editors, writers and their friends are more or less guaranteed to fall in the demo anyway, why not use the sources at hand?

Even the Times concedes "this topic defies hard and fast rules," and some of the editors have had second thoughts about talking a hard line. Still another friend of mine who has written frequently for the paper once asked and received permission to use her friends in a story, only to discover much later, after it appeared, that the top editor in question was not so sanguine about it, badly damaging her relationship with the Times. "At first I felt like I had been the worst reporter ever, and then I felt pretty hung out to dry," she says now. "So, the lesson: Don't write about your friends. Even if your editor says it's OK. Because, chances are, your editor has editors. And it's their job to make sure things like this don't slip through the cracks. We both slipped, and I got caught."

And that's all I can offer in the way of a consensus. Philosophical nuances aside, it's in all likelihood a bad idea. Keep your friends and sources separate, or risk losing both.

Greg Lindsay is a freelance writer and regular contributor to mediabistro.com.