Sacramento Bee buzzes round sacked hack's sources

TODAY'S EDITION of the Sacramento Bee has a lengthy post mortem on the career of Diana Griego Erwin, a long standing columnist who resigned from the paper last month.

Staff writers at the Bee have published a story today claiming that they found 43 cases in which people named by the columnist couldn't be found to be real people.

The hacks at the Bee even went back 12 years to scan her columns to find people mentioned in them, apparently with no success.

The Sac Bee inquiry can be viewed in the context of an interview with her in newsreview.com, where she maintains her innocence and also pointed to frequent columns where she said she had used a different name and sometimes place to protect the people she had talked to.

The lengthy Sac Bee inquiry can be found here (free sub).

Columns are generally colour pieces, and writers are given latitude because of their writing styles and the more intimate feel to a story they give. It's an entirely different discipline from news reporting. While US and UK news journalism vastly differ, fact checking remains important. That doesn't mean that reporters have to violate the trust of their sources - cruel and unusual treatment by news editors and editors can lead to good hacks and hackettes finding themselves that the tap runs dry because if they're forced to name everyone they talk to, they may find the names of their sources in print. That usually spells curtains for the sources. It also means that if the deep throats feel they may find themselves named, they run for the hills.

A good news editor should, by just pitching a few pertinent questions here and there, be able to establish whether a reporter's story has what British hacks call legs, without attempting to squeeze the hacks or hackettes for contacts until the pips start flying and the story dies on its feet. The increased vigilance that the Sac Bee talks about is not a bad thing in itself.

But in the world of IT hackery at least, journalists can find themselves under enormous pressure from vendors who are sometimes prepared to use any trick in the book to prevent a story from emerging. That includes, but is not restricted to law suits, "forking tricks" by PRs who ought to know better, and indirect and sometimes very direct pressure on journalists' publishers.

In hindsight, shouldn't we hacks have realised that Intel teaming up with Apple to appear as a friend of the court against various people leaking inside stories meant something more than just the two companies were pals?

If the job of a hack is just to reprint companies' press releases, isn't it about time we were called public relations officers too and paid the extra money that PRs get? µ