When Ontario Premier Doug Ford addressed a group of reporters in January, as politicians do – it’s sometimes referred to as a “scrum” – he was asked whether he might call an early election, as that was a rumour at the time.
Mr. Ford hedged, responding, “Stay tuned. But we need a mandate from the people.”
Then, as The Globe’s Laura Stone and Jeff Gray reported in a Jan. 22 article: “After walking away from the cameras, he added: ‘Off the record, you guys, your bosses are going to love it. There’s maybe tons of advertising and you get to keep your job for another year or two.’”
The next day, a reader e-mailed me to ask whether Mr. Ford’s comment really was “off the record” – and, if it was, why did The Globe and Mail publish it?
Despite the frequency with which it is used, the term “off the record” is not well understood, so I thought I’d take this opportunity to offer clarity and some context.
“Off the record means the information cannot be used for publication,” says John Daniszewski, a journalist with the Associated Press wire service since 1979, and its recently retired vice-president and editor at large for standards.
This is different from “not for attribution,” which means the information can be used in an article but its source cannot be named. Instead, the attribution might read something like, “according to a source familiar with the matter.” (More on that below.)
Key to any off-the-record interaction is that the source and reporter agree to the terms.
“There has to be consent from both sides,” Mr. Daniszewski said. “You can’t say, after the fact, ‘off the record.’ And as a public figure and a politician, he should know better.”
He continued: “There would be no obligation … for reporters to respect that. It was a throwaway as he walked away.”
Without the requirement for mutual consent, Globe reporter Laura Stone points out, “any politician could say that any time they didn’t want to be quoted – which isn’t right.”
But what if a source who is not a public figure or a media-trained corporate leader wants to speak off the record? In such a case, the onus is on the journalist to ensure the person understands what that means, because the source is “not really going to know the rules of the game and they may make some false assumptions,” Mr. Daniszewski said.
It’s unlikely a source doesn’t want the reporter to use the provided information at all – which is what off the record means, he added; the person probably means they don’t want their name attached to the information. An unnamed, or confidential, source still needs to be described somehow, however, and the details of that description should also be agreed upon between reporter and source.
The offer of confidentiality should not be taken lightly or often. But, as stated in The Globe’s Editorial Code of Conduct: “The use of confidential sources is vital to any notion of a free press, and to the pursuit of public interest stories that might otherwise remain untold. ... They are not anonymous to us, as a publication, and we actively grant confidentiality as opposed to sources requesting it.” In all cases, it is The Globe and Mail that grants confidentiality, not an individual journalist.
At The Verge, corporate PR requests to speak off the record or without attribution had become so common that the online technology publication responded by introducing strict editorial policies in 2021. At the time, editor-in-chief Nilay Patel wrote: “From now on, the default for communications professionals and people speaking to The Verge in an official capacity will be ‘on the record.’ ”
Mr. Daniszewski said that he, too, has seen an increase in requests to speak to journalists off the record. “Even a lot of the Washington reporting – it gets kind of lazy where politicians want to get messages out but don’t want to pay the price of being accountable for their words. Vox pop – people on the street are nervous about having their names used now in a way that they weren’t a few years ago because they know that their comments may live forever online and they may be doxed or attacked for something they say, for expressing their opinion, so it’s a corrosive trend.
“I don’t really have any easy answers other than to try to explain as well as we can to the people we’re interacting with why the name makes their information so much more credible. And if they’re speaking factually and truthfully, they really don’t have anything to fear, or they shouldn’t have anything to fear.”
Mr. Daniszewski added that the Associated Press has pushed back by saying, “We really need a name or we’re not going to use this.”