Chummy with sources

Here is an interesting case of a reporter being outed on how he works his sources. A weekly competitor FOIA's the emails between city officials and the reporter and found some funny exchanges and others that seemed to show how the reporter and city officials were bargaining on when a breaking story would come out. This columnist points out that, while embarrassing, he didn't do anything wrong. God knows I've had some pretty important exchanges with sources over e-mail and, yes, other people could get access to some of them over time. Personally, I don't think what this reporter did is wrong either. But it demonstrates that when you are covering a beat, especially one that has a single, key entity, like city hall, or a big company, it is easy to become part of their machine. They didn't buy you off - they were nice to you. You talk to them every day. They are smart people with kids who maybe went to the same college as you. When things go bad, it's not that the reporter won't write something bad, it's that the report feels bad for the good people on the other side. I don't recommend erecting an icy wall. I think reporters can be/ should be friendly or even friends with people inside the entities they cover. However, it's a good idea to just remind the people you deal with every so often that if they screw up, you are going to write about it. What do you think?

http://blog.washingtonpost.com/rawfisher/2008/03/how_the_sausage_is_made_a_repo.html