This blog is turning into a place to vent. Today I want to vent about poaching sources.

A few times I’ve been contacted by people saying very nice, flattering things about something I’d written lately, followed by “can you tell me who you talked to to write the story because I’m doing one on the same topic?”

It’s often journalism students who are doing this, which I have mixed feelings about: on the one hand, they’re just students, so they don’t know any better…on the other hand, they’re students, so they should know better. I don’t usually respond to these things.

A couple weeks ago I was contacted by an actual working reporter who wanted me to give her the personal e-mail addresses of two people I spoke with for an article. Uh, no?

Here’s the thing. The request was strange to begin with. The people she wanted to reach were “just” average folks, plucked mostly at random. If you do any amount of local reporting you see this a lot: a national story is, well, localized… by talking to local people. If you’re going to do a story based on something another journalist has written, those local people can be basically anyone. You might need Hilda Solis specifically for an unemployment story, but you could talk to any number of people standing outside the employment office waiting for their checks.

So it was weird that this reporter wanted to speak with these specific “average” people. But the request was worded so politely and I felt…well, bad for her. So I told her, look, I doubt they’ll be interested, but I will send them an e-mail and say they can contact you if they are interested. Otherwise, I recommend….. and then I listed a number of places where she could go to find other similarly-minded people.

This is, other journos will attest, far above and beyond the call of duty. I sure as hell wouldn’t expect anyone else to be as kind if I tried to poach their sources. (Which pretty much is what this is.) (Side note: I write tons of “me too” stories—it’s basically impossible to have a new idea, anyway—but I at least try to add something new rather than re-interview the same people on the same topic.)

Fast forward a week or so: The same reporter contacts me again. This time she’s evidently on deadline as her tone is much different: she essentially says: “give me their e-mail addresses.” Straight up.

I sent her a (perhaps too) sharply-worded response. Was I mad? Yes. Can you blame me?

The irony of the situation, by the way, is twofold:
First, she’s ensured that I’ll remember her in a negative way if she ever needs a favor again.
Second, the people she was looking for—whose first and last names were printed in the article I wrote—are both incredibly Googlable.

Sigh.