Sources & Anonymity Policy
The Massachusetts Times · Published by The Massachusetts Times Company · massachusettstimes.us/policies/sources-anonymity · Effective October 16, 2026
The Source Terms are our binding promise to the people who talk to us — the attribution ladder, the protection, the compact that outlives everything. This page faces the other way: it is the discipline we impose on ourselves about when anonymity is granted at all, how anonymous material is tested, and what the reader is told. Every sentence here is kept today.
1. Named Is the Standard
1.1. The record is built from named speech — people who stand behind what they say, identified to the reader who must weigh it. Every departure from that standard costs the reader something, and this page exists to make sure the purchase is always worth it.
1.2. Anonymity is granted, case by case, for cause. It is never a default, never a courtesy, and never a convenience for either side of the notebook.
2. When Anonymity Is Granted
2.1. A grant of anonymity requires all four of these, together:
— Significance. The information matters to the record — not merely to the story's color. — Necessity. It cannot reasonably be had on the record, from this source or another. — Stakes. The source faces real exposure — to safety, livelihood, or retaliation — not mere embarrassment, inconvenience, or tactical preference. — The masthead's approval. The grant is the institution's act, as the Source Terms state: the masthead holds the identity, weighs the first three tests, and answers for the grant.
2.2. A request failing any test is declined, and the honest answer given: on the record, or not in our pages.
3. What Anonymity Is Never For
3.1. Never for attacks. Criticism of a named person is made on the record or it is not made in our pages. We do not hand the curtain to one party and the exposure to the other; an anonymous pejorative quote is a weapon we decline to be.
3.2. Never for spin. Anonymity is not granted to recite what the speaker's institution would say anyway, with the accountability removed. Talking points carry names or they carry nothing.
3.3. Never for leverage. Anonymity is not traded for access, softer coverage, or future favor, and a source's attempt to make it so is reported to the masthead as what it is.
3.4. Where a source's motive for speaking is tactical and the grant still passes Section 2 — a leak that serves its leaker and the record at once — the material may run, and the motive runs with it to the extent it can be stated without exposing the source.
4. Testing Anonymous Material
4.1. Anonymous material is tested harder, not softer, as the Verification Policy requires: the reader cannot weigh a name we withheld, so the weighing becomes entirely ours.
4.2. No anonymous claim establishes fact without corroboration — a first-class source, a document, or independent confirmation. A claim resting on a single anonymous voice publishes, if at all, only as what it is: a claim, attributed as far as safety allows, with the state of the evidence stated, under the Record Policy's grammar.
5. What the Reader Is Told
5.1. Every anonymous sourcing carries its reason, stated plainly on the work — why the name is missing — as the Source Terms promise. Anonymity is a loan from the reader's trust, and the reason is the interest paid on it.
5.2. The description standing in for the name is agreed with the source, as specific as safety allows, and never sharpened afterward to lend the quote more authority than the agreement bought.
5.3. Where the source's interest in the telling is material and can be stated without unmasking them, it is stated.
6. Granted Means Kept
6.1. Once granted, the promise is the Source Terms' promise, whole: held by the institution forever, on a need-to-know footing, on systems built to hold little, behind the uniform refusal to confirm or deny, against every demand, through every succession. This page adds no exceptions because there are none.
7. We Count Our Own Ghosts
7.1. The masthead watches this publication's own dependence on unnamed voices. A record filling with ghosts is a record failing this page — each grant may be defensible while the pattern is not — and the pattern is treated as a craft defect to be worked back down.
7.2. This section has no enforcement mechanism outside us, which is exactly why it is written here in public: now you know to count them too.
8. The Record of This Policy
8.1. This policy is kept in dated versions at its address, so the discipline governing any unnamed voice can always be checked against the work's date.
This policy is one of the Policies this publication keeps.