The Embargoed Source and the Rival's Scoop
You are a BBC news producer on a weekday evening shift. At 16:10 a source inside a government department tells you, on condition of anonymity, that a minister will resign at 18:00. The source has been reliable twice before but you have no second confirmation. At 16:40 a rival broadcaster publishes the resignation story citing "sources." Your editor asks whether to match it now. Meanwhile your source messages: "If you name me or hint at my department, I'm finished - and I'll deny everything." You have a 18:00 bulletin slot and a live page. The minister's office has not responded to your request for comment sent at 16:20.
1. Should you publish the resignation now? Set out the decision and the conditions under which you would or would not run it.
Read the worked answer
Decision: do not run the resignation as fact yet; run a holding line.
Reasoning:
- One anonymous source plus a rival's report is not independent verification - the rival may be relying on the same source or on the same unconfirmed claim. Matching a competitor is not a verification standard.
- The claim is highly consequential (a named minister's career) and falsifiable within hours, so the cost of waiting to 18:00 is low; the cost of being wrong is high.
- The minister's office has had only 20 minutes; a right-of-reply window should be honoured before publication of an allegation this serious.
What you can do now:
- If the rival's story is already public, you may report that as a media story ("another broadcaster is reporting...") without adopting it - clearly attributed and flagged as unconfirmed.
- Keep working the second source and the press office.
- At 18:00, if confirmed independently, run it. If not confirmed and no denial, you may report that resignation is "expected" with attribution, not as settled fact.
Source protection: never name or narrow the department in a way that identifies the individual. If the source says they will deny, that is a warning that your story could expose them - factor that into wording.
2. How should you handle the source's threat to deny everything if identified?
Read the worked answer
Treat the denial risk as a source-safety problem, not a credibility problem.
- A source who will deny under pressure is normal; it means your protection duty is high, not that the tip is false.
- Strip identifying detail: no department, no job title, no "a senior official close to..." phrasing that narrows the field.
- Do not paraphrase their words in a way that could only have come from them.
- Tell the editor the constraint explicitly so wording decisions are made knowingly.
- If the only way to make the story stand up is to describe the source precisely, you don't have enough - get a second source instead.