The New York Times’s Policy on Anonymous Sources

Clark Hoyt, the Times’s public editor:

The policy requires that at least one editor know the identity of every source. Anonymous sources cannot be used when on-the-record sources are readily available. They must have direct knowledge of the information they are imparting; they cannot use the cloak of anonymity for personal or partisan attack; they cannot be used for trivial comment or to make an unremarkable comment seem more important than it is.

Is this proof that Jobs’s problem is not a recurrence of cancer? No. But if you think The New York Times published the aforelinked paragraph lightly, or didn’t measure every single word of it very carefully, you don’t understand how The New York Times operates.

★ Thursday, 15 January 2009