Facilitating Sourcing from Real-Life Encounters

A common theme we heard from journalists was the way in-person social encounters led to cultivating sources via follow-up conversations on chat apps. An American wire service reporter told us how chat apps allowed him to continue chance conversations: “I’ll go out to some party or a reception or a press conference. I’ll have a short conversation with someone I’ve just met. I might be in the line for the bathroom and meet someone who works in some beleaguered industry in China that I’ve never turned my attention to before.”⁴⁹ A digital news journalist found that his most reliable sources on chat apps were people he had met in person. “Usually I approach [potential sources] in person. Once I approach them, we try to establish a method of communication, and it was almost always Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp.”⁵⁰ Similarly, some journalists discovered that chat apps offered the type of communicative space that lent itself to follow-up discussions.

After making initial contact on an open platform, reporters often followed a source’s lead on which platforms to use in subsequent conversations. As a print reporter described:

A lot of the information you get at the start of the reporting process is derived from people posting anonymously on these forums. A very common thing is somebody will post something on Baidu. The way we contact them is we send a private message to them and say, “Hey, I’d love to talk to you,” or reply to them in the forum and say, “Can you talk to me?” Then somebody will say, “Here’s my QQ, you know, just message me.” The other option is if we’re reaching out to them we’ll say, “I want to talk to you. Here’s my QQ. Can you contact me?” ⁵¹

Just as reporters use chat apps to follow sources, some media-savvy sources use chat apps to keep in contact with reporters.