When I was editor-in-chief of Spare Change News from 2003 to 2007, one of my reporters made a phone call that, in ret­ro­spect, proved to be quite inter­est­ing. But more on that soon.

Our writer emer­i­tus Jeff Guevin for­warded me this Salon arti­cle in which Glenn Green­wald com­ments on the con­tro­versy sur­round­ing a recent arti­cle that led to U.S. Pres­i­dent Barack Obama fir­ing the gen­eral in charge of the war in Afghanistan:

With his Rolling Stone arti­cle on Gen. [Stan­ley] McChrys­tal, Michael Hast­ings has become both the per­son­i­fi­ca­tion of, and spokesper­son for, Real Jour­nal­ism, and as a result, has pro­voked intense ani­mos­ity from establishment-serving “reporters” every­where.

He appar­ently com­mit­ted the gravest sin:  he exposed and embar­rassed rather than flat­tered and pro­tected a pow­er­ful gov­ern­ment offi­cial, and in our upside-down media cul­ture, doing that is a sign of irre­spon­si­bil­ity rather than ful­fill­ment of the basic jour­nal­is­tic function.

First of all, I am not going to com­ment directly on the Rolling Stone arti­cle because I do not know the cir­cum­stances under which it was pub­lished. There are too many ques­tions: Was any­thing con­sid­ered “off the record” or “on back­ground”? Was this com­mu­ni­cated to the reporter? If so, did he vio­late those agree­ments? The rule of thumb for any­one — any­one — talk­ing to a jour­nal­ist is that every­thing assumed to be “on the record” unless it is explic­itly stated oth­er­wise (and usu­ally beforehand).

What I can dis­cuss is the con­stant ten­sion between “news” and “access” in the con­text of jour­nal­ism, whether it is local or inter­na­tional. And this is where my story from my SCN days is relevant.First, the back­ground. Before I became the edi­tor, Spare Change News was viewed as an advo­cacy, lob­by­ist news­pa­per — or even a “lib­eral” rag at worst — that was always biased, espe­cially on issues of home­less­ness. (The issue is actu­ally com­pli­cated, and there are many sides.) When I was hired in 2003, my goal was to “repo­si­tion” the news­pa­per in the mar­ket as a pro­fes­sional pub­li­ca­tion that would cover so-called social-justice issues as fairly and impar­tially as pos­si­ble. But many peo­ple did not get the memo.

So, my reporter once called a gov­ern­ment agency to find out what they were doing on a spe­cific project. (Obvi­ously, I still can­not give details.) The low-level assis­tant who answered the phone said some­thing like this: “We’re not doing any­thing on that right now — other projects are the pri­or­ity.” The clerk, of course, was assum­ing that we were still a lob­by­ist orga­ni­za­tion who was call­ing for infor­ma­tion rather than a news­pa­per that was call­ing for infor­ma­tion to print.

So, my reporter had a story: This gov­ern­ment depart­ment was doing noth­ing on an issue that was impor­tant to our read­ers. A scoop, right? Well, wait.

The assis­tant must have real­ized his mis­take because the spokesper­son for the gov­ern­ment agency left my reporter a mes­sage stat­ing that the clerk’s infor­ma­tion was “off the record” because he was not autho­rized to speak to the press.

My reporter asked me what he should do. In my formerly-blunt, hard-boiled edi­tor mind­set, I said: “Fuck them — they messed up, and you got the truth. Write the story. If they have a prob­lem, say your edi­tor ordered you to do it.” One com­mon trick in jour­nal­ism is for reporters and edi­tors to play good-cop and bad-cop in dicey situations.

And then, an hour later, I got a voice mail. The spokesper­son told me that if we printed the story, we would be black­listed — no call­backs, no quotes, no infor­ma­tion, no leads, noth­ing for the fore­see­able future. So, what did I do? More on that soon.

I admire the fact that Green­wald believes that the Rolling Stone arti­cle was an exam­ple of “Real Jour­nal­ism” as opposed to “Establishment-Serving Jour­nal­ism.” That might be the truth. But his feel­ings are only cor­rect in an ide­al­is­tic world that does not work in the world of real­is­tic jour­nal­ism. Reporters — and their edi­tors — make com­pro­mises all the time. This is the issue: “Is this story worth any future access that I might lose?” I am not say­ing that I agree with it — I am writ­ing only that this is the unfor­tu­nate way in which the jour­nal­is­tic world works.

When I debated my response to the gov­ern­ment spokesper­son, I had to con­sider this ques­tion. SCN cov­ered this par­tic­u­lar agency all the time — and if we were black­listed, we might not have enough news to fill a paper each time. But was this story worth the sac­ri­fice? It is an exam­ple of a real, prac­ti­cal con­cern that all jour­nal­ists face.

In the end, I told the press offi­cer that my reporter would con­sider the phone call to be “off the record” and that he would quote only com­ments from another spokesper­son (who would then call shortly). Of course, the reporter was upset. But as I told him, the story itself was not exactly Water­gate — in the big-picture it was not impor­tant enough to risk a total loss of future access. I am not proud of it — but I had a news­pa­per to run. If it had been a major story that was vitally impor­tant to the pub­lic inter­est, I would have said the jour­nal­is­tic equiv­a­lent of “Damn the torpedoes!”

Here is the point. When­ever a reporter cov­ers some­thing impor­tant like the White House, the gen­eral in charge of Afghanistan, or even Boston City Hall, there are always trade-offs and polit­i­cal nego­ti­a­tions. If a reporter reports his exclu­sives all the time with­out regard to the con­se­quences, then he will lose all of his con­tacts and sources — and end up unable to work and report future news after­ward. If a reporter never reports his exclu­sives, then he is not doing his job. Find­ing the mid­dle ground is dif­fi­cult. It is always a sub­jec­tive decision.

Again, I do not know the cir­cum­stances that led to the Rolling Stone arti­cle. But the end result (whether right or wrong) was a prime exam­ple of a reporter valu­ing a story over his future access. A dif­fer­ent reporter might have done some­thing dif­fer­ent — we can never know.