NY Daily News using anonymous sources

You really think all 53 players in Denver's locker room think Tebow should be starting over Quinn? I highly doubt it.

 

I don't like it as much as the next person, but in this day and age it absolutely is par for the course. ESPECIALLY in the New York tabloids. No surprise at all.

It's amazing what you can get players or coaches or whoever to say when they are reported as anonymous. As a beat writer, you have to trust your instinct, sources and knowledge about the situation to gauge whether or not it's worthy of a story.

And as a fan, I tend to trust reporters than newspapers. A story such as this, if it's a beat guy I read a lot and familiar with, I trust the story even with the anonymous names because I know I'm getting a pretty genuine and legit feeling of the locker room and what players are thinking.

The beat guy did his work: he brought fans a perspective they never would have gotten. I'm sure fans will tell you they'll take that any day of the week, even if players' names aren't revealed.

It's a new day of journalism, folks. Might as well accept it or be left in the dust.

 

New day of journalism? Go back and read the NY papers' coverage of the Yankees in the late '70s or the Mets in the late '80s.

 

I have to agree with 1HP's take, and that's lucky for me, because that's also how my bosses think. My paper's policy is that every anonymous source must be approved by a glass office.

Couple points:

Over the course of more than 30 years, I have worked with exactly one reporter who consistently and accurately broke news on a competitive beat without ever once using an anonymous source. (But I was not always in agreement about the methods that writer used to get people to go on the record.) Of course, I have spent almost all of my career in very competitive markets and to a great degree the nature of your competitors -- and your newspaper's pecking order in the market -- is going to help you decide what you do on a specific beat.

But the competitors don't decide everything for you. Some people here seem to think "New York tabloids" play by exactly the same rules, as if it were like a parliamentary procedure or something. No, not really, not on everything, even though the News has a lot of Post alumni on staff.

 

I don't know the reporter on this story but I do know the editor, and I guarantee she wouldn't let this through if she didn't know the sources and didn't believe the reporting was anything but air tight.

 

I'm curious to know more about those methods, if you could share without giving away the reporter or the newspaper.

 

I don't really want to do that. He didn't blow anybody, if that's what we're getting at.

 

Not exactly what I was picturing, but no worries about not sharing more details

 

Manish is a great guy. Bugs me that people implied he'd make it up (not here). But I do question the credibility of his sources. If I was his editor, I'd have encouraged he counteract the anonymous sources with some quotes from players refuting the claims -- on the record. A lot of players rushed to call bullshit after the story ran when that would've been good to include. Instead, he gave other reporters the chance to piggyback his story and make 'anonymous sources' look jaded and foolish.

Ultimately, it ended up turning into another piece fueling the Daily News' agenda to suggest Peyton Manning to the Jets. They've been waving that flag for a month now.

 

Good luck with that.


No pun intended.

 

Woodward and Berstein did some good journalistic work and almost all of it derived from leads given to them (actually one of them) from an anonymous source who remained anonymous for several decades.

This story reeks of backstabbing - - making it significantly different from the story Woodward and Bernstein worked on. It would be more satisfying to know "who said what about whom" in this matter, but I cannot get my shorts in a knot over the presence of unattributed sources here.