Those darned anonymice
My friend Ted Vaden is the new ombudsman at The News & Observer. Ted was my boss 20 years ago when I was a reporter at the N&O. After a stint as publisher at The Chapel Hill News, he's back in the fold. He wrote a column today on the Raleigh newspaper's policy on anonymous sources. It mirrors ours.
Ted says: "It's a finger-in-the-dike proposition to protect one local newspaper -- and its readers -- from information that can't be verified. The N&O does a respectable job of that with local coverage and a better job than most newspapers with the wire service news it doesn't control. But unfortunately, until the standards upstream are better, the paper still needs to come with a warning label: Let the reader beware."