Meeting Anonymous Sources... On Your Own... In The Rain
We look at how to deal with an anonymous source.
My girlfriend knows where I am. Roughly. She knows I’m somewhere in Pretoria. I look around the mostly empty parking lot not really seeing any security. And then there’s no time to reconsider because the man is in my car. He’s filling the passenger seat. The doors lock automatically, ironically as a safety feature. He wants to be kept anonymous, so no recording from my side.
I have done this - meeting strangers to ask about corruption or assassinations in my car - enough not to be scared exactly, but every time feels like I may have been a tad obnoxious in pushing my luck. The easier it has gotten the more cavalier with my safety I've become.
Tip 1# - Dealing with an anonymous source
Aside from the safety aspect I’ve outlined here, no journalist likes to have a source kept anonymous. For one series I went to the lawyers (handled by the wonderful man Charl Du Plessis at Willem de Klerk Attorneys) they stressed how problematic it could be for this central character in our second episode not to be named. It removes accountability for the information that you are conveying. So we were careful that the parts we used from the interview were backed up in other places and by other people. This was a way to take the case in a specific direction - but couldn’t act as conclusive proof on its own.
The second challenge of anonymous sources - for when working in audio - is there is no other voice. I am suddenly narrating the source’s actions AND words and my own questions. From a listener’s perspective this can be an overload of narration and we needed to bring in our sound engineer Richard Rumney to help with a tactful use of sound design. Rumney says he took the music and “isolated the section without drums, then time-stretched it, filtered it with a high-pass filter and automated a hall reverb to push the sound into the background.” This was to make it more interesting than just listening to my voice.
Tip 2# - Think in Scenes
I originally wrote about this for GIJN when we released our first investigative series Alibi, which was - during its initial series - about the possible wrongful conviction of a man called Anthony De Vries.
The best advice I got, which unfortunately came far into the process of creating Alibi, was to think in scenes. Before you even write out your questions for an interview, start to imagine what scenes will anchor your story. For this, I need to credit Rob Rosenthal’s HowSound podcast. I listen to this obsessively and it taught me many things, including the appreciation that print is nimble when shifting to a different person or scene. But in radio each location or person needs to be introduced carefully, and information that isn’t captured in one of your “scenes” is likely to be lost on your listeners.
Audio is incredibly powerful at creating a sense of time and space, but inefficient at conveying dense information. I realized that I needed to combine the one with the other whenever I could.