Your Friends and Sources
“What’s so wrong with asking your pal for a quote?” Greg Lindsay asks.
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 statement 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.
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