These unnamed sources reveal a wide range of information a journalist would not have otherwise known, such as redundancies being planned by a company, a company's financial problems or the fact a business is in administration or in the process of going into liquidation.
The trick, of course, is to turn what is usually limited information into a credible story which is legally sound. A lot of the time this can be relatively straight forward, such as getting the tip-off confirmed by the business itself or an administrator or insolvency practitioner. Sometimes, however, it is not so simple.
Two examples from the past few days highlight the different ways anonymous tip-offs can go.
The first relates to a tip-off about Hampson Aerospace Machining, in Scudamore Road, Leicester, which was recently bought by Darwin Private Equity. A worker rang to say the new management had announced it was cutting 19 jobs, a fifth of the workforce. This was despite the newly-installed chairman telling us a few days before that the takeover "would be very good for employees" and no cost cutting was planned.
This was a good story which was fairly easily written following a quick phone call to the chairman, who confirmed the job cuts, but denied that his previous statement had been a pledge not to reduce the workforce in the short term (the semantics of business speak is a subject for another day).
The second example was when the brother of a worker from a medium-sized Leicestershire firm called to say his sister had told him she and other workers had not been paid this week because of the firm's financial problems. Given that the business employs well over 100 people, the tip-off, if it turned out to be true, would, of course, be a significant story. However, after a few probing questions I realised the story I was being told was not as straight forward as the caller had initially made out.
A call to the boss of the business confirmed that things were a lot more complicated. The boss, who only spoke to me on the condition everything he said was off the record, said staff had not been paid a proportion of their wages this week (he would not give me an exact figure), but that more than 80% of them had agreed to it because they realised it was for the good of the company. He said the cut in wages was only happening for one week, but the rest of the information he gave me was rather vague. He said he did not want to see a story printed because it could jeopardise the future of the company and the 100-plus workforce. He also pointed out the fact that only one employee had contacted me highlighted the support the management had from staff on this matter.
He then challenged me to write a story based on what I knew without quoting anything he had said (which was the condition on which in spoke to me in the first place), menacingly telling me his lawyers would be taking a close interest in what I wrote. Given the lack of an official union source and the fact the conciliation service Acas refused to confirm they were involved, I know at this point it is impossible for me to write a credible and legally watertight story.
But I did tell the boss I would be calling him again if another of his workers contacted me with any more details. He promised to take my call.
No comments:
Post a Comment