Tag: The News & Observer

Unfortunately, My Lips Are Sealed

After I retired from The News & Observer in October 2008 I went to work full-time for a law firm.  Two years, eight months later, when that case was settled, I  began working part time for other lawyers, always on the side of plaintiffs or, in one criminal case, defendants.

I was paid to read and make suggestions.

After a lawyer files suit he or she goes fishing, looking for the proverbial “smoking gun.”  They force the other side to turn over boxes of records, thousands of pages, sometimes hundreds of thousands of pages — emails, invoices, letters, reports, expense accounts, test results, text messages, transcripts, memos, and on and on.

Day after day I would sit in my office at home and read, marking documents that were interesting with postie notes, documents I thought my employers could use to punish the other side.  And then I made suggestions, people I thought they should depose, and questions  they should ask.  The lawyers I worked for did as they pleased, of course, acting on my suggestions or ignoring them.

That work was a lot like the work I did for 35 years as an investigative reporter, where I acquired and read beaucoup government records — a train load. No, two train loads.

A lot like but not the same in two important ways:

When I was a newspaperman I asked the questions.  When I worked for lawyers I was not  allowed to personally question anyone, to depose witnesses, because I am not an attorney. 

More importantly, when I was a newspaperman and I found wrongdoing, I wrote about it in my newspaper and, sometimes, something got done about it.

When I worked for lawyers I discovered things that would set your hair on fire, so to speak.  But my lips were sealed — I was required to sign non-disclosure agreements as a condition of employment.  

It’s been hard, keeping my mouth shut.  Really hard.

I decided, finally, that this was payback.  Not being able to put those stories in the paper was my punishment for whatever bad things I had done and hadn’t already been punished.

Coming Monday: Algonquin!  A Dream Come True

The Memo I Ignored

Bob Brooks, the managing editor of The News & Observer for most of my time there, sent the staff the most puzzling memo I had ever seen.  The memo said reporters could not promise to protect the identity of a source without his permission.

I can’t begin to tell you how nutty that edict was.  I talked to people off the record practically every day. Other reporters did, too. Any reporter  who says he or she never goes off the record must be covering, I don’t know, the school lunch menu?

Bob Brooks, at a news budget meeting in the early 1980's.
Bob Brooks, at a news budget meeting in the early 1980’s.

Bob was a good newspaperman. I respected him, I liked him, too. He couldn’t possibly be serious, could he?

So I went to his office, memo in hand, and asked him what it meant.  He said he meant what it said — end of discussion.  Bob had zero tolerance for anyone who challenged his authority.

I went back to my desk, sat down, and thought about it.   Until recently judges had been citing reporters for contempt and putting them in jail when they refused to reveal the identity of a confidential source.   But judges had finally wised up and realized that some reporters wanted to go to jail to protect a source.

So they quit jailing reporters and started fining their newspapers instead, up to $5,000 a day, a lot more in today’s money.  I figured that must have been the reason for crazy memo: If one of our reporters refused to reveal a confidential source, and they hadn’t gotten permission from Brooks, The N&O would claim that the reporter had acted outside the scope of his or her employment.  That’s the only explanation that made sense to me.

After that I didn’t worry about the crazy memo.   I ignored it.   I kept doing my job the way I had always done it.   And, as far as I know, so did everybody else.  

NOTE: By the way, “Off the record” and “Not for attribution” are not the same thing. Not for attribution meant I could use the information but I could  never identify the source. Off the record meant I couldn’t do anything with the information without further negotiation.  Most often the source would say I could use the information if I could find it somewhere else and he or she might tell me where I could find it.  Or I could use it, not for attribution, after a certain date. The N&O stopped using anonymous sources in investigative stories in the late 1970’s.

Coming Friday: Nuts!