Wise Advice

by Andrea King Collier, Sam Greengard, Florence Isaacs & Minda Zetlin

Q: A member poses the question: "'Is it okay to use friends and relatives as sources for real people anecdotes?"'

Andrea King Collier
Our friends and families are real people. We prospect for people to illuminate our stories, and often the best stories come from our neighbors, our sister's husband's sister's niece. If I am doing a story on breast cancer, I am going to talk with people I know who are living with breast cancer. I am going to talk to doctors I know and doctors I don't know. Our worlds are so big and populated with all kinds of people. We would be crazy to overlook them.

Sam Greengard
It depends. A writer should never "settle" for an interview with a friend or family member when someone else is available. So, the first rule is: Don't be lazy. However, there are situations where a friend or relative opens the door to a world that wouldn't otherwise be accessible … or offers insights that would be extremely difficult to obtain elsewhere.

Here's the gut check: Can I tell the story honestly and without bias? If you have to change facts or use a pseudonym simply because the person is a family member, then you're probably veering off track.

If you're not sure about the situation, it's probably best to use information from family and friends as general background material. The bottom line is that you don't want to deceive your audience in any way. Does the reader care that "'the real person"' is your uncle or sister? Almost certainly not. Does your editor care if you rely on family and friends? Probably not (though it's always good to check, if a question arises). Do readers and editors care if you deceive them? Absolutely. You don't want to destroy your credibility—and reputation.

Florence Isaacs
I often use friends and relatives in my books and articles. I've written about my mother-in-law, my children (many times), my husband and my pals. I get so many of my ideas from my own and their experiences. My policy is "'If the experience is relevant, why not?"' A good anecdote is a good anecdote. What's important is that facts are accurate. The second story I ever published featured my aunt's diabetes. Did it matter that we were related? It made the story more human. It might be a different story if I wrote investigative pieces (I don't), or perhaps if I wrote a medical article using my cousin the doctor as my only research source. The implication seems to be that knowing the person slants the article, but I feel it depends on the kind of story and the subject—and whether you can be objective and careful not to pull any punches.

Minda Zetlin
It's OK for one simple reason: Anecdotes, by their nature, are not scientific. So, it's fine to use your friends and family for anecdotes, but bad to substitute anecdotes for scientific evidence.

For instance, if you're writing an article about how to deal with road rage, you can use your mother's/husband's/best friend's experiences as illustrations of what to do or not do when faced with another driver in a rage. But just because your mother, husband and best friend all encountered road rage does not entitle you to conclude that it is a widespread or increasing phenomenon.

If you want to say road rage is growing, find the statistics to back you up, something several journalists probably wish they'd taken the time to do. A few years ago, a spate of media stories, one inspiring the next like dominoes, called road rage a "growing' problem until some university researchers decided to actually check out the statistics. Turned out the growing phenomenon was stories about road rage, not road rage itself. Incidents of actual road rage were in fact declining.

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Andrea King Collier, Sam Greengard, Florence Isaacs and Minda Zetlin are long-time ASJA members. Find out more about them by accessing the members' directory at http://www.asja.org/memdb/search.php