Reporters and vulnerable sources

Powerful stories often feature the voices of people with very little power. Listeners sometimes wonder whether the journalists who interview these sources are exploiting them.

In fact, reporters who routinely tell the stories of vulnerable people have skills and techniques they've developed specifically to avoid exploiting their sources. Knowing that this advice was out there, we decided to put it all in one place.

Earlier this week, we published a column about the need for journalists to embrace the additional responsibility that comes with the privilege of interviewing people who take great risks to share their compelling stories.

At the end of the column is a list of best practices that we hope will be useful to journalists, as well as to people who want to know more about the journalistic process.

Read the column.