The following is an excerpt from American Journalism Review senior contributing editor Lori Robertson's June/July 2007 article "Kind of Confidential," which appears on the AJR website here. 

In late March, Jim Taricani met for the first time with an anonymous source, who showed the investigative reporter some documents. The papers were critical to a story he was covering. The two discussed the documents for about an hour, and then Taricani, who works for Providence, Rhode Island's WJAR-TV, asked what level of protection the source was seeking. "'I want total confidentiality,'" the reporter recalls his source saying.

Taricani then explained the policy he had been told to present in such situations by Media General, WJAR's owner. "I actually had to tell him that I would protect his confidentiality, if we were investigated, up until the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals," he says. "If we lose at the 1st Circuit..I would need him to sign an affidavit saying he was the one" who provided the documents.

The reporter is no novice when it comes to protecting anonymous sources. In late 2004, Taricani was handed a six-month home-confinement sentence for refusing to reveal the name of a confidential source who gave him a videotape from an FBI investigation into corruption among Providence officials. Taricani's latest source was quite familiar with his case and said he'd be glad to sign the document. "Lucky for me," says the reporter, "he agreed."

Such a detailed agreement is one way to cope with a precarious legal landscape studded with cases in which a reporter's privilege to keep confidential sources a secret has been rejected in court...

...Dan Bradley, Media General's vice president of news for the broadcast division, says he has been urging reporters for several years to obtain written agreements from anonymous sources.

"We ask the reporter to try to get the source to agree to signing a document..that would lay out the parameters of the steps the reporter will take to protect the source," he says, "and at what point would [the source] grant permission for that reporter to reveal the source."

As of May, the company's guidelines did not require journalists to get such agreements, but he said they would likely be updated to include the stipulation as "a hard requirement."

The standard agreement may not include the exact language of Taricani's pact, says Bradley, adding it will be "broad enough to be practical and still be specific enough to be helpful."

Taricani says he was under the impression that the policy was "pretty hard and fast." But if a story were of great importance, a Watergate-level event, and a source wasn't going to sign an agreement, it's his sense that WJAR and the company would discuss the situation. "It seemed to leave the door open for at least some leeway."

Conversations with sources about written agreements are awkward, he says. But the two times he has asked sources to sign agreements since Media General bought the station last year, they've done so. In both cases, "the likelihood of getting investigated was very slim," he says, adding that the sources realized he would probably get documents they had given him through Freedom of Information Act requests...

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