When It’s OK to Pay for a Story

[Commentary] Journalists frown on paying sources.

This decades-old principle stems from the belief that the tawdry practice corrupts the authenticity of information: If I pay you to tell me your story, you may distort its details to up the value.

WikiLeaks disturbed many journalists with an initiative to crowd-source a $100,000 “bounty” on the text of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal. The website, which made headlines in 2010 when it published large caches of leaked documents from the United States military in Afghanistan and Iraq, has been pressing hard for sources to steal the trade documents; it has already published three leaked chapters (a reported 26 remain secret). Setting a bounty on the treaty text turns journalistic mores on their head. In traditional newsrooms, the idea of offering a cash incentive for the leaking of confidential documents is anathema. But WikiLeaks, like other media disrupters, leaves us no choice but to reconsider this prohibition. If journalism organizations refuse to do so, they relegate themselves either to secondhand reporting on documents obtained by those outside journalism or to being left behind.

[McBride is a media ethicist and a vice president at the Poynter Institute]