Source Terms
The Massachusetts Times · Published by The Massachusetts Times Company · massachusettstimes.us/terms/source · Effective October 16, 2026
In plain terms. Talk to us and we hold the line. The vocabulary of attribution — on the record, on background, deep background, off the record — is defined on this page so it means the same thing on both sides of the table, and any ambiguity about what was agreed is read in your favor. A promise of confidentiality here is kept: inside the newsroom on a need-to-know footing, against outside demands by every lawful means, and on systems built to hold little worth seizing. The promise survives the story, the reporter who made it, and even the sale of this company. We do not pay for information, we verify before we publish, and the one thing that breaks the compact is using us to plant a lie. This summary is part of the terms and binds us like any article below.
Article 1 — The Compact
1.1. This page is The Massachusetts Times Company's standing offer to every person who gives information to The Massachusetts Times. When you engage us in reliance on it, it is an agreement, and you may hold us to it under the Dispute Terms like any other term we publish.
1.2. The compact binds us from the first contact — before any story is written, whether or not one is ever published, and whether you came to us or we came to you.
1.3. Nothing here requires you to be practiced at dealing with the press. The compact is written for the schoolteacher and the clerk as much as for the press secretary, and Article 4 makes that enforceable.
Article 2 — The Ladder
2.1. On the record. Your words and your name are both usable. This is the default when nothing else is agreed, because the record is built from named speech.
2.2. On background. Your words are usable; your identity is not, and you are described only by a formulation agreed with you — never improvised, never sharpened later.
2.3. Deep background. Your information may inform our work; your words are not quoted and nothing is attributed to you in any form.
2.4. Off the record. Nothing you say is published or attributed. It may guide what we then seek to establish independently, but the off-record words themselves are never laundered into print through that door.
2.5. These definitions are terms, not conventions. At our desk they mean what this page says, on both sides, every time.
Article 3 — Setting the Level
3.1. The level is set before the words are spoken, and it travels with the words from that moment. A conversation can move up or down the ladder, but each statement keeps the level it was given.
3.2. A request made after the words were spoken to lower them down the ladder is not owed — the words were given at their level — but we hear such requests, and where granting one costs the record nothing, grace is our practice.
3.3. A request to move words up the ladder — a source deciding to be named — is honored at the source's word.
Article 4 — The Source's Canon
4.1. Ambiguity in the compact is read in the source's favor. Where it is unclear what level was agreed, the reading that protects the source more governs.
4.2. Plain speech counts. A person who says "don't use my name," "keep this between us," or words to that effect has set a level on this ladder as fully as any professional, and we take their evident intent, not a technicality against it.
4.3. This canon is the mirror of the reader's canon that governs all our terms: in both, the institution that wrote the rules carries the weight of their ambiguity.
Article 5 — Identity Protection
5.1. A promise of confidentiality is kept on a need-to-know footing inside the newsroom: identity travels no further than the editorial judgment of the work requires.
5.2. We minimize what exists to be taken. The Data Terms' architecture — collect little, keep less — applies with its greatest force to sources: records that would expose you are not created where the work does not require them, and are not kept past their need.
5.3. Demands for a source's identity — subpoenas, orders, informal pressure from any quarter — are tested, not obeyed by reflex. We resist by every lawful means, to the end of the lawful road, and where the law permits notice, you hear from us before anyone else does.
5.4. We make no promise to break the law, because a promise we could be compelled to abandon would be a lie at the moment it was made. What we promise is everything short of that: resistance, notice where lawful, systems that hold little, and a record of every demand under the posture of the Data Terms.
Article 6 — What We Never Do
6.1. We never trade a source. Identity is not currency for access, advantage, advertising, or relief from pressure, at any price, from any party.
6.2. We decline to confirm or deny sourcing, uniformly, in every case — so that our silence about you is the same silence we keep about everyone, and signals nothing.
6.3. We never punish a source for also speaking to others, for declining to speak again, or for criticizing us. The compact is not an exclusivity contract and carries no loyalty test.
Article 7 — Verification Still Governs
7.1. The compact protects you; it does not suspend our judgment. Confidentiality is never a promise of publication, of uncritical publication, or of publication on your schedule.
7.2. We corroborate. Anonymous information is tested harder, not softer, because the reader cannot weigh a name we withheld — the weighing becomes our job.
7.3. The compact survives non-publication in full. A story that never runs leaves the promise standing exactly as if it had.
Article 8 — The Boundary
8.1. The compact is broken by one thing: knowing fabrication — using our pages, under the shelter of this compact, to plant what you know to be false.
8.2. Even then, the break is narrow. After verification to the standard of the Correction Terms, we may expose the deception and its author to the extent required to correct the record — and no further. The break is a remedy for the record, never a general license to open files, and it is invoked by the publisher's considered act, not a reporter's irritation.
8.3. Honest error breaks nothing. A source who believed what they told us, and was wrong, keeps every protection on this page.
Article 9 — Documents and Materials
9.1. Materials you provide are taken into careful custody: handled to minimize the traces that could identify you, held no more widely than the work requires, and scrubbed of identifying residue before anything is published.
9.2. We may describe a document rather than display it, or display it in part, where showing it whole would expose its path to us. Protecting you is a reason we will accept a harder way of proving a story.
9.3. We receive what you choose to give us. We do not direct you to take what you have no right to take, and the choice to provide is yours, made before the compact's shelter — which then covers you fully.
Article 10 — Anonymity Before the Reader
10.1. Anonymity in a published work is a loan from the reader's trust, so the work says why it was granted — in a line, plainly — and describes you as specifically as your safety allows and no more specifically than was agreed.
10.2. This article serves both canons at once: the reader learns why a name is missing; the source decides, with us, exactly what stands in its place.
Article 11 — Payment
11.1. We do not pay for information. No fee, bounty, or thing of value is exchanged for what a source tells or gives us, because paid testimony corrupts the record it builds and endangers the source it touches.
11.2. This article does not prohibit the ordinary and incidental — a cup of coffee at the table where the conversation happens — and it never prohibits paying for work, which the Contributor Terms govern separately.
Article 12 — The Compact Outlives Everything
12.1. The promise is the institution's, not any one reporter's. It survives the departure of everyone who made it, and the desk that inherits the work inherits the obligation whole.
12.2. If The Massachusetts Times Company's business changes hands or form, every compact formed under these terms travels to the successor intact under the assignment article of the Terms of Use. No sale opens the vault; a buyer takes the obligations with the archive.
12.3. There is no expiration. A confidence given in this publication's first year is kept in its hundredth.
Article 13 — Disputes Under the Compact
13.1. A dispute between a source and the publication runs under the Dispute Terms like any other: notice and thirty days' cure first, then the open courts — never an arbitration ambush, never a gag.
13.2. Where a dispute itself risks exposing the source, we conduct our side so as to protect the identity at stake, including seeking the sealing of what must be sealed, and nothing in a dispute suspends Article 5.
Article 14 — Changes to These Terms
14.1. Any narrowing of these commitments is a material adverse change and takes effect no earlier than thirty days after we publish a dated notice, as the Terms of Use require.
14.2. No change reaches backward — here most absolutely of all. Every compact formed under any edition of this page is governed by that edition for as long as the compact lives, which is forever.
Article 15 — The Spine These Terms Share
15.1. These Source Terms incorporate the Open Covenant and the general articles of the Terms of Use: the reader's canon, one-way severance, assignment to successors, the record of versions, and the governing law and open courts carried by the Dispute Terms.
15.2. Where these terms and any other page we publish could be read to conflict about a source's protection, the reading that protects the source more governs.
Article 16 — The Record of These Terms
16.1. The current text of these Source Terms lives at massachusettstimes.us/terms/source, with its effective date at the head. Prior versions and their dates are kept and published alongside it, so every source can see exactly what was promised on the day they relied on it.
These terms are part of the Terms that govern this publication.