By Deborah Howell
Sunday, November 26, 2006

An old newsroom saying goes: Don't let the facts get in the way of a good story. It's an irreverent quip, but it also can mean that a feature narrative can be unduly disrupted by having to attribute each and every fact. Or it can mean that reporting gets compressed for space reasons, and readers can't tell how much reporting was done.

Journalists gain readers' trust by attributing facts and showing how they reach conclusions. The buzzword is transparency. Attribution doesn't have to appear in every sentence or paragraph, but a reader should know without doubt how a story is sourced.

Reader Mario Possamai of Toronto raised a good question last week that can come up with longer stories written from an intensely personal angle. "David Finkel's piece 'The Meaning of Work' was brilliant. But in reading its so well-crafted narrative and voices, I kept wondering how he had been able to report some parts of it, like the poignant conversation between Mike and Chris. It would help the reader's assessment of the veracity of a story if we knew more about how it was put together. . . . Was the reporter there? Was the conversation based on a reconstruction from Mike's recollection? Chris? Both? . . . It would help sometimes skeptical readers to know how scenes . . . were reported and how the Post ensured the reporting was accurate and totally factual."

In this story, part of the Post series"Being a Black Man," Finkel followed District resident Chris Dansby over months as he looked for a job. The conversation Possamai referred to was between Dansby and his friend Mike Rogers over how much to blame discrimination for Dansby's joblessness. The story read as though Finkel was present, and he was. Not only did he hear the conversation, he recorded it.

But that wasn't explicitly stated in the story. He gave hints by describing the men's walk to where they grew up, writing that Dansby spoke with "his voice breaking," that Rogers "turned away," the kind of detail that only someone who was there could have known.

The Post's rules on quotations say: "We must be careful about our use of the word 'said.' Standing alone, it should be used only when the reporter heard the source say the words quoted, either in person, on television or radio. . . . When we put a source's words inside quotation marks, those exact words should have been uttered in precisely that form."

The story followed those rules, but readers wouldn't have known that. An editor's note could have made it clear. Possamai suggested that: "What might help the reader is something as simple as a box next to the article outlining how the story was reported and what steps were taken to ensure its veracity. Knowing how The Post reports this kind of story would certainly enhance its importance and the reliance with which we can hold its stories."

National reporter Anne Hull wrote a series two years ago on the lives of gay teens. In a piece on Oklahoman Michael Shackelford, this paragraph described her reporting: "With the Shackelford family's permission, Washington Post reporter Anne Hull spent hundreds of hours following Michael over the past year as he came to terms with being gay, a journey that paralleled Oklahoma's fight against same-sex marriage. The reporter accompanied Michael to work, church, car shows, speedways and Saturday night forays to the gay teenage dance club in Tulsa. Extended periods were spent in the Shackelford home, where Michael and his mother, Janice, struggled to understand each other. The events and direct quotes in this story were witnessed by the reporter unless otherwise noted."

The point is to communicate intimacy and authority, Hull said, but "I'm not trying to imagine what's inside somebody's head." Interior dialogue is problematic and not usually used by Post reporters.

Newspapers do this kind of deep reporting better than any other daily news media. Finkel won a Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting this year. Hull has been a finalist several times.

Another reader, David Siegler of Oakton, asked, "Is this fact or fiction? No one was quoted" in the dramatic beginning of a story by sports reporter Eli Saslow on two Johns Hopkins University lacrosse players -- Greg Raymond, who was driving drunk when he had an accident that killed his passenger and best friend, Matt Stoffel. The reader wanted to know how Saslow knew what happened in the accident when he wasn't there.

Reconstructions are controversial. But in this one, it was pretty obvious how Saslow knew because he quoted Raymond extensively. And, though he didn't say so, Saslow had read the police report. He could have resolved the reader's question simply by having Raymond "recall" the accident.

To keep stories at readable lengths, reporters and editors often leave out information gleaned from reporting. In talking to reporters about readers' queries, it's common to discover information and sources that were not mentioned. It's understandable that readers think one or two experts were interviewed if they're the only ones quoted. Stories also cite polls or reports without identifying them.

For readers, it's better to say: "Seven experts were interviewed and all generally agreed with" whatever the premise or conclusion is, or to say that six polls or four reports were checked, with a brief description. Such information is often supplied in graphics, which some readers miss.

The Post stylebook says, "The Washington Post is committed to disclosing to its readers the sources of the information in its stories to the maximum possible extent. We want to make our reporting as transparent to the readers as possible so they may know how and where we got our information."

Deborah Howell can be reached at 202-334-7582 or atombudsman@washpost.com.