Last week, it was from reader J.E. Williams of Carrboro, who wanted to know why the paper hadn't run a story about Syrian officers helping insurgents in Iraq. "I hope it was not omitted in order to make room for the story on 'British battle used gum,'" Williams said.

Nope -- although the Feb. 23 gum story was pretty juicy. Problem was that the allegations in the Syria story were unconfirmed, according to the AP report. The editors ran into the same problem last week on a story about Osama bin Laden urging terrorist Abu Musa al-Zarqawi to attack the United States. The Washington Post story was based entirely on anonymous sources, and N&O policy limits use of unnamed sources.

Every night, N&O editors toss out such unsubstantiated stories, newsworthy as they might be, because of the policy against unnamed sources. Thus, when The Post reported in January that the Bush administration had finally given up on finding weapons of mass destruction, The N&O didn't have the story the next day, even though other papers did.

Inevitably, the paper gets grief from readers who see or hear the stories elsewhere and not in The N&O. Often, they assume the omission is deliberate, to suppress news that doesn't conform to the paper's "liberal agenda" (In the case of the weapons story, liberal readers perceived a conservative agenda!).

The N&O's anonymous source policy says, "Avoid them in almost every case, whether light feature pieces or hard-hitting investigative article." In the rare case that a sourced story needs to go into the paper -- say, three sources tell The N&O that the governor will resign tomorrow -- use of the story still must be approved by the managing editor. That happens rarely.

Why such punctiliousness? When I was a reporter in the post-Watergate era, use of anonymous sources was almost a badge of honor among reporters -- an emblem of our insider access to the workings of power, a sign to readers that the paper knew the inside scoop. But in today's environment of low confidence in the media, newspapers can't afford such cavalier squandering of believability.

"This all goes back to credibility," says N&O Managing Editor John Drescher. "We just think readers want to know where our information comes from, and it builds confidence when they know that."

The unnamed-source policy plays out in two ways: in locally generated stories reported and written by staff reporters, and in stories -- mostly national and international -- supplied by the paper's wire services.

Not much problem with the local stories, although the policy handicaps reporters sometimes. Just recently, The Charlotte Observer was able to beat The N&O with a scoop on Gov. Mike Easley's budget by using anonymous sources. The N&O reporters had most of the same information, but not on the record.

Probably most affected are The N&O's investigative reporters, Pat Stith and Joe Neff. Both value the policy on unnamed sources. "I've used them twice in my five years as an investigative reporter here -- both times on national security stories, but only backed up with documents," Neff said. "It's a great policy we have, and I wish the national press corps would boycott anonymous briefings and off-the-record roundtables en masse. People in power hide behind anonymity, which should only be given to whistleblowers or other people in actual jeopardy."

Neff points to the real dilemma with the source policy, that it handicaps local newspapers on national and international stories where they aren't doing the reporting themselves. The N&O relies on services such as AP, New York Times and Washington Post/L.A. Times for its non-local coverage. Often for competitive reasons, the national newspapers regularly rush into print stories based on unnamed sources. But there also is a culture of anonymity in Washington that allows, even encourages, reporting with flimsy substantiation.

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