The first time I opened my Venmo app to send money to a source, my stomach twisted uneasily. It was fall 2021 and I’d just started working in earnest on a book project, an oral history of the 2017 white nationalist riot in Charlottesville, Virginia.
I was in the early stages of a set of interviews that would take up the bulk of my time for the next 18 months: interviewing activists, survivors, first responders, students, counterprotesters and clergy who were on the ground on Aug. 11 and 12 and formed the first line of defense against the armed and violent neo-Nazi demonstrators who killed counterprotester Heather Heyer and injured scores of others.
And now, I was about to send the first of these sources money, which I’d never done before.
Paying sources for stories or information (sometimes called “checkbook journalism”) is traditionally seen as either unethical or an affront to the entire profession, depending on whom you ask. According to the Society of Professional Journalists, “the practice of checkbook journalism threatens to corrupt the newsgathering and reporting functions of the media. … It threatens to undermine journalism and damage democracy.”
But as we’re having industrywide conversations about whose stories get told and who profits financially from those projects, it’s worth revisiting this blanket rule with some more nuance. There are absolutely ethical issues with offering money in exchange for stories, but when working with marginalized people and essentially profiting off their trauma, there are also ethical issues with not compensating them.
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As a journalist with about eight years of experience, including almost six at CNN, I had never exchanged money for information or a story before working on my book, “24 Hours in Charlottesville: An Oral History of the Stand Against White Supremacy.” It was antithetical to the ethics of journalism, at least the way I’d been taught.
But soon after I started working on this project, which was very close to my heart as a former Charlottesville resident, University of Virginia student, and local news reporter in town, I started to question this basic journalism tenet.
I’d spent the last few years watching as national news reporters (which I was now, too), documentary producers and journalists come to Charlottesville and produce incredible, award-winning journalism about what happened in the bucolic Virginia college town during the Summer of Hate in 2017 and the years after. At the same time, a community backlash was slowly growing, a rising frustration among local activists and survivors who, years into this work, were getting burnt out contributing so much unpaid labor to these journalism projects.
On one level, it was a practical concern; spending hours in interviews is time not spent working for a wage, and you can’t pay for rent and groceries with cable news clout. But it was also a deeper question about the ethics of unpaid labor, and especially of what kind of people we ask for unpaid labor. Too often, it’s women of color.
So it was in this context that I started thinking about how I could possibly ask survivors to spend hours speaking to me, reliving the most traumatic days of their lives in intense detail, without any kind of compensation. It sounded like work, work they deserved to be paid for.
Around the same time, I was researching the practice of oral history. As a journalist, I already interviewed people for a living and felt comfortable doing so, but I wanted to make sure I was honoring the tradition that I was stepping into for this project. In that research, I learned that compensating “narrators,” as sources or characters are called in oral history, is a strongly valued, common practice.
“If you think about the roots of oral history in Indigenous cultures and how strategically white supremacy was used in order to silence those voices, now when we uplift those individual voices and we value them, we are counteracting this oppressive belief of devaluing the voice,” according to oral historian Noor Alzamami, who holds their oral history Master of Arts from Columbia University and worked with me on this project.
Part of that “valuing” is literally assigning a financial value to these people’s time. They are folks who often hold marginalized identities and who may not be financially privileged.
“We all deserve to get paid for our time,” Alzamami said.
But most journalists would say that exchanging money could also create a conflict of interest. That’s part of SPJ’s position, in addition to the concern that accepting money in exchange for stories or information incentivizes people to lie or embellish what they know, trying to drive up their price.
These are all valid concerns. Stories of paying sources are prevalent when reporting in areas facing war, famine or other dire humanitarian crises. Syrian journalist (and, disclosure, my friend) Qusay Noor told me foreign journalists would come to his community outside Damascus during periods of intense international attention and offer local families hundreds of U.S. dollars in exchange for an interview if it was an especially interesting or salacious story.
“But it means that this family will tell you anything that you want to (hear) about, and I saw this happen in many stories,” he said. “If you give them money, they say, ‘I can tell you anything you want.’”
It certainly wasn’t the fault of these families, who were desperately trying to save their starving children with any money they could find. But putting money on the table at all can skew incentives and, the argument goes, journalistic truth.
At the same time, I still felt it was ethically gray to return to my former home and ask marginalized people, many of whom are still recovering from physical and mental wounds from the summer of 2017, for hours upon hours of unpaid labor for my book project.
So, in consultation with oral history experts and my publisher, I decided to go ahead and compensate “narrators” for my project. I set firm boundaries upfront with each person I compensated. I communicated that each person would receive the same flat rate. The money was simply compensation for their time and did not come with any editorial control whatsoever. Participants were not allowed to have a copy or transcript of their interview, determine what was or was not included in the book, or even read an advance copy of the book before I submitted the final draft to my publisher. Many have still not read the book and won’t be able to until they buy a copy at the store.
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So, did I get snookered? Were people lying to me for money?
The thing is, I’m always asking myself that question as a journalist, whether I’ve paid a source or not. I never believe someone wholeheartedly without fact-checking the information, like second-sourcing or verifying with documentation. And I’m always reading people’s body language, tone, tenor and internal consistency when telling stories. That didn’t change because I’d paid them.
But the benefits were manifold. On the most basic level, I was able to interview a wider range of people with diverse perspectives, especially those who had to take a few hours off work to talk with me. Perhaps paradoxically, my final product would not have been as accurate as it is without their stories, which I could not have gotten if I required their unpaid labor.
So, paying sources on this specific project worked for me, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to turn around and start paying everyone I interview. In fact, I haven’t paid any sources since the book, and if I did, I would disclose that information upfront. That’s how I ended up handling the thorny issue in this book: I was still working at CNN, and the standards and practices team asked me to add a sentence to the manuscript making it explicitly clear “that while compensation is best practice in oral history interviews, it is not standard in journalism and I have never offered compensation for an interview or information in my role as a CNN producer.”
But my experience compensating narrators on this oral history project makes me wonder if we shouldn’t take a second look at that policy as journalists, at least in long-form stories that come with a major time commitment.
Natalie Bullock Brown is a documentary filmmaker and professor, and member of the Documentary Accountability Working Group, which promotes ethical and responsible nonfiction filmmaking, including conversations about compensation.
“Filmmakers (are) going on to maybe even become fairly wealthy off the backs, literally, of the people who are at the heart of their films. And those participants don’t get anything in return,” she said.
She recommends looking beyond just monetary payments, though, toward a broader understanding of compensation that could include child care during interviews, meals provided on filming days and licensing fees for archival footage and home movies.
At the very least, it’s important to remember that high-level, ethical conversations like these are often happening at the same time that people we interview are having trouble putting food on the table.
“When you’re paycheck to paycheck, that 50 bucks that you make, that might pay for your groceries that week,” Alzamami said. “Why wouldn’t you do that for someone that took the time out of their day to share their story with you?”
“24 Hours in Charlottesville: An Oral History of the Stand Against White Supremacy” is available for purchase now. To support local, independent bookstores at no additional cost to you, purchase through Bookshop.
