Are You Building Trust With Your Sources?

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When you're having those kind of interactions with people, do you spend time building trust in shallow waters before you say, ask about ben laden? One of the perils of journalism is becoming too friendly with your sources. My my usual thing is to try to ease up te tention. Just make suretat that my source knows that i am going to be fair in terms of my questioning. But also, i put a taper quarter between the two of us, so that he's always aware that this is on the record.

Lawrence Wright is an author, screenwriter, playwright, and a staff writer for The New Yorker.

”There’s nothing more important about a person than their story. In a way, that’s who we are. And yet, memories fade and people die. So those stories disappear and the job of the journalist is to go out before that happens and accumulate the kinds of stories that are going to help us understand who we are, why we are, where we are right now in time, and try to thread those stories into a coherent narrative. In a way, you give it a kind of immortality. And that’s a big job. It’s a great privilege.”

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