A recent Reuters Institute webinar dug into a highly embarrassing, retracted investigation by India’s The Wire and also laid out best practices for investigative newsrooms to avoid both deliberate and unintentional source errors.
In the public imagination, reporters working with whistleblowers has traditionally meant All the President’s Men-style cloak-and-dagger stealth — meetings in shadowy underground garages, potted plants turned into signals, Hal Holbrook’s whispered exhortations to “follow the money.” But today, journalists’ interactions with whistleblowers are more likely to come in Signal chats or secure drop boxes than Washington, DC garages. And that shift has changed the terms of engagement in often confusing ways.
