Being Careful with Sources

In a digital age, it's easier than ever for someone to pretend to be something that he or she is not. This can be a serious issue for a journalist. (In fact, I've got an article coming up in the October issue of The Writer on how to help detect such problems before they happen.) I came across an example of someone pretending on the social networking site Twitter to be from ExxonMobile. A market analyst from Forrester wrote about the "person," assuming that her defense of such things as the Exxon Valdez was real. He never checked out the person, and so looked like a fool in print. It's a danger to take people at electronic face value. Before using comments that someone makes, be sure you know who exactly is making them.

The En Passant Quote

In chess, en passant (in passing) is a specific circumstance under which one pawn can capture another while moving by it. But a few years ago I found a way of using a quote in passing.

I was writing an article for Newsweek, which meant a lot of information in a small amount of space. In this case, I had about800 words and 10 sources. Normally that would be overkill and you wouldn't use all of the material, but in this case I really wanted to, so I had to find a way to fit it in without being too obvious in the reading.

So I experimented with using a quote as both a way of delivering additional information and acting as a transition between paragraphs at the same time. Here's an example:

..."Many of the people running dot coms have never run a business before. All they're doing is spending a lot of money and getting very little return." Experience is key, because there are no hard and fast rules about exactly how to value intangible services like consulting. As Marty Winston, an old time technology PR expert, puts it, "PR pricing always has been a bit of voodoo."

More often, though, the real source of trouble is "Internet time," the frenzy that arises when the impossible is expected and service providers have to lavish staff and other resources on projects simply to keep up. ...

In this case, the Winston quote adds an insight into a business issue - PR pricing - while creating a natural transition to the next paragraph. It's not a technique that always works, and overuse can look clumsy, because you might well be using quotes from two different sources in one paragraph after another. But when you need to squeeze a bit more into limited space, this reduces the need for separate transitions, and the words they require.