Verify all details you didn’t witness yourself. Don’t repeat unconfirmed claims.
Details matter. Journalists like to include the brand of the beer, the make and model of the car, and the name and breed of the dog.
Most stories won’t suffer too much if the reporter ducks an occasional minor detail. But without verified details, you don’t have journalism. If you do your job as a journalist — interviewing multiple sources and corroborating their claims — then you should encounter plenty of viewpoints with overlapping details that that line up.
Once when I shared the journalism catchphrase “verify or duck,” some of my students laughed because they thought I said “verify your duck.”
If the story holds together without the iffy parts, great. Don’t even mention the parts you can’t verify. It’s not your job as a reporter to spread “unconfirmed rumors.”
If your entire story depends on one outlier whose unique claim nobody can confirm, you don’t have a story.
