I am a lover of the New York Times. Loving the New York Times is an essential piece of my identity, similar to the movie Goodfellas. I wouldn’t know how to be me if these two things did not exist.
For any lover of the NYT, the Jayson Blair plagiarism and fabrication episode was a real bummer.
But it lead to the creation of a new policy on Confidential News Sources Policy, which has been in place since March 1, 2004. When the policy first came out, there was a jarring sort of thing about reading the paper– there was always a clause associated with the granting of anonymity.
Anonymous sources have been the topic of the paper’s own public editor many times. Here’s a good index of Clark Hoyt’s writing on the subject.
I did some goofy hand-pasted stuff. In 2007 I copy/pasted anonymity clauses onto Twitter. This is actually how I used Twitter for the first x months I was on it:
The Ink-Stained Wretch has attempted to track it using Google News feeds.