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You’re talking with a community member you want to interview, but they’re wary. What does it mean to be “on the record?" Where will my words end up? Is it safe? 

Pittsburgh-based nonprofit PublicSource is putting those worries to rest and building trust with a new handout created in partnership with Define American, a nonprofit dedicated to storytelling about immigrant experiences. 

The postcard-sized handout titled “Talking to Journalists: What You Need to Know” is offered in multiple languages and allows journalists to educate sources on the spot about the journalistic process. 

“It started with a problem,” said Rich Lord, PublicSource managing editor. PublicSource was trying to do "deep community reporting" in Beechview, a neighborhood that functions as the hub of the Latino population in Pittsburgh. "We really wanted to understand the circumstances that population was facing and how that neighborhood was faring, and a lot of the growth that that population was helping to create in Beechview. So we began to engage.”

The PublicSource team quickly realized two things: First, they didn’t have good Spanish language capacity in the newsroom. Second, because community members weren’t familiar with the American media landscape, many didn’t understand the terms the newsroom used to describe what they were doing.

“‘On the record’ may mean something very familiar to you and I, but may not have any meaning to someone who is not brought up in the American media landscape,” Lord said. “So we needed a tool and we needed guidance.”

The newsroom reached out to Define American, which offered a virtual training session, “and we realized, hey, there's a lot to learn that we could take further than just one lunch and learn session.”

To start to bridge the power imbalance between the newsroom and the communities they wanted to cover, PublicSource created something they could easily pass out. (Full disclosure: I was a K-12 reporter and audience editor for PublicSource from 2020-2023.)

Now, Lord said, there are versions of the “Talking to Journalists” postcard in languages including Spanish, Dari, Pashto and Nepali. 

At first, the journalists handing out the postcards worried that everyone would choose the “off-the-record” option. 

“But that has not been the case,” Lord said. “People have looked at the card. They've either glanced at it or read it thoroughly, and they've said, ‘OK, this appears to be a good-faith effort to look out for my interests.’ I have not seen or heard from my colleagues an instance in which somebody has looked at this card and said, ‘I’m out,’ or ‘I’m staying off record’ on anything. It's been the opposite effect.” 

To learn more about PublicSource’s venture, read this story from their website.