Something bad was bound to happen eventually.
California Watch has distributed stories for print, radio, TV broadcast and online-only publication to roughly 200 news partners since September 2009.
Last month, someone breached our confidentiality.
But first, a little background on how we work with our media partners.
Our story lists are shared with our network members, outlining our developing stories weeks and sometimes months before we publish or go on the air. We typically distribute embargoed content two weeks prior to the publication date to give our partners time to offer feedback and plan for the space needed to accommodate rather large packages that often include photos, graphics, video and multimedia elements.
It takes a lot of faith and trust to do what we do.
I never would have imagined doing things this way as little as three or four years ago. Investigative journalists in particular are typically guarded – even paranoid.
Some keep even their own colleagues at arm's length, worried that they will lose a scoop or compromise a source if information falls into the wrong hands. But at California Watch, we’ve operated on trust – trust that newsrooms won’t steal our stories, mishandle our planning memos or break embargoes.
Trust is a two-way street. Many news organizations have shared details about their stories and plans – placing faith in us to keep these details confidential. This mutual trust has paid off for us and for our partners. We wouldn’t do anything to jeopardize it.
Over the past couple of years, we’ve seen partners break an embargo or two – nothing major and nothing malicious. In those rare instances, it typically has happened when a newsroom’s web staff jumps the gun on posting a story because the editor handling the story inside the news organization hadn’t passed along embargo times to his or her colleagues. Those problems were easy to fix.
But it’s not a perfect world.
After distributing scores of stories without incident, we experienced our first major problem a few weeks back.
A full version of our story on PG&E’s ClimateSmart program was leaked to a key source a couple of days before the embargo. Journalists traditionally frown upon sending drafts, or even sections of a draft, to a news source. It gives the source a feeling of power and control. The act itself gives the source – at a minimum – a sense that he or she has some editorial say in what you publish. We were able to deal with the source and deal with the situation. We always welcome scrutiny. And in some respects, there was a benefit in the leak because we got a clearer sense of the source's position about the story. As a result, we actually made a couple of minor changes to the draft that added context.
That was the easy part. The hard part has been determining how the leak happened.
We know it didn’t come from us. But we shared the story with numerous media partners in advance. We have been unable to sort out exactly who sent our story out or why – though we’re still searching for answers. In the meantime, we’re looking closely at our own internal process in terms of how we distribute stories – to make it clear that our drafts are confidential and proprietary and to attempt to limit the number of eyeballs on our work inside partner newsrooms.
Ultimately, we hope this won’t drastically change how we work. Any new organization is going to have a list of lessons learned. So add this to the list. We’ll probably be a little more guarded about how we share our work next time.
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