As journalists, one of the first things we are taught is to report the truth.
At The Post, we have policies in place to ensure we are as transparent as possible with our readers. We want to be able to establish trust with our audience and be able to keep it.
Each article that is written has to go through an editing process where we check for grammar and structure issues. We also fact-check every article printed.
Writers sit down with editors and go through their notes and recordings to make sure quotes, dates, locations, names and any other important information is correct.
That is not to say we don’t ever make mistakes. We sometimes make a human error, because we’re still learning as student journalists. It frustrates us when we make them, but we learn to take ownership of our mistakes and learn from them.
We also want to show that we are using reliable sources when reporting to show where we got our facts, which is why one of The Post’s policies is to not use anonymous sources.
Recently, we used an anonymous source when reporting on the incident of the man falling from the utility pole last week.
It was a tough decision to move forward with reporting on the story.
On one side, the video, which we did not publish, was quickly going viral on social media. On the other side, people did not want to be put on the record for fear of getting in trouble with a student organization or the police. Many were too intoxicated to go on the record.
We ultimately decided it was a better decision to write the story, because nothing like this had happened in Athens in recent years.
Since the video was spreading on social media and people might not want to watch it, we decided not to upload it with the article. Instead, we described what could be seen in the video and used what witnesses told us.
For the anonymous source, we spoke to someone who agreed to go on the record but did not want their name used. In addition, between four reporters, we spoke to dozens of people on the street to get a better sense of what happened.
We spoke to as many people as possible until we comfortably had enough information to report on it.
In the morning, the article was updated with more information from the police report and videos posted on social media.
That was a rare instance in which we went outside our normal policies, but we felt it was important to find out as much information as possible to report and prevent false information from spreading.
While it is a rare occurrence we go outside our anonymous source policy, it was important to explain to our audience why it was done.
As journalists, it’s up to us to find out the facts and be as transparent as possible with our audience.
Ellen Wagner is a senior studying journalism at Ohio University and the editor-in-chief of The Post. Have questions? Email Ellen at ew047615@ohio.edu or tweet her @ewagner19.
