Advice on Journalism: Rick Rodriguez

The Arthur W. Page Center for Integrity in Public Communication has conducted oral history interviews with several of the nation’s most influential journalists. The Page Center website features a vast collection of transcripts and videos of these interviews. On this blog, we will highlight some of the advice given by professionals on attaining positions in the field of journalism.

Rick Rodriguez is the former executive editor and senior vice president of The Sacramento Bee, who joined the Cronkite School at Arizona State University as the Carnegie professor, Southwest Borderlands Initiative. His staff, while at The Bee, won many of the country’s most prestigious journalism awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for feature photography, the George Polk award for investigative reporting, the Robert F. Kennedy Award, National Headliner’s award, Sigma Delta Chi, Overseas Press Club, American Society of Newspaper Editors diversity writing award, and many others. He was the first Latino to serve as president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors and is a graduate of Stanford University.

Anonymous sourcing can be a slippery slope

“What we have to sell as journalists to the public is credibility. And if they can’t trust what we write and we can’t trust our sources, if we can’t trust that the government officials are being fair and accurate in what they’re reporting… then the whole democracy we have in the United States breaks down.”

“I think anonymous sourcing is dangerous. You can make up quotes. You don’t have to tell anybody anything.”

“Using anonymous sources gives you the potential to make stuff up and that’s why I like putting names by it. Again, it goes back to that whole idea of trust and credibility. But there are certain situations—Watergate. You know, you needed to protect that anonymity. But it goes back to, do you trust your reporters? Does it bind… have they given you a reason to trust them. And does the public have a reason to trust you?”

“One of the things that scares me about the future, are we going to erode that trust? Has accuracy given a way to immediacy? It’s a big issue. People now, when I talk to editors you know…I had one of the folks at McClatchy one time said, you’re not getting on the web fast enough, I said I want to be accurate. And he said well, my new motto is instead of ‘ready, aim, fire’ it’s ‘fire, ready, aim’. And I said, well it’s not mine.”

“As we’re trying to differentiate ourselves on the web as established institutions, as the credible news organizations, I think we will damage ourselves by taking approaches like that.”