Scott Alexander closed his blog, Slate Star Codex.
As he tells it, a reporter from the New York Times was writing a story about the blog and the reporter told him that the paper would reveal his full name in an article. (Scott Alexander is the blog author’s first and middle name, but he doesn’t use his last name on the blog). Alexander decided to close the blog in the hope that it would preserve his anonymity because he was afraid that publishing his last name would put him at risk of losing his job or that it could endanger his housemates. Alexander writes,
When I expressed these fears to the reporter, he said that it was New York Times policy to include real names, and he couldn’t change that. After considering my options, I decided on the one you see now. If there’s no blog, there’s no story. Or at least the story will have to include some discussion of NYT’s strategy of doxxing random bloggers for clicks.
So he closed his blog in an attempt to preserve his anonymity.
Should the NYT have published Scott Alexander’s real name? Saying it’s “NYT policy” doesn’t seem very persuasive for two reasons. First, I couldn’t find NYT policy on this, but the policy I did find says that the NYT permits anonymity when there is a good reason for it (e.g., in criminal justice or national security contexts). Felix Salmon points to this statement, which also says that names can be withheld when people have good reasons.
The paper also refers to anonymous artists like Banksy or Elena Ferrante by using their pseudonyms. The NYT also uses stage names, like “Lady Gaga, 34” rather than “Stefani Germanotta, 34.” And the NYT recently published an article that included the line “The Chapo co-host Virgil Texas (he lives and works under that pseudonym)” and also withheld the name of the co-hosts then-girlfriend who works in media because “she wants to stay anonymous; the Chapo fans scare her.”
And second, even if there were some kind of policy, that wouldn’t settle the question of whether the NYT should require the use of real last names in cases like Alexander’s or the Chapo story. Instead of citing a policy, Journalists and editors need to use their own judgment to decide whether publishing someone’s real name is important enough for a story that it’s worth the harm it would cause.
Some people may say that the NYT shouldn’t publish Alexander's full name because it is doxxing, which is the term that he uses. I’m not sure about calling it doxxing though since lots of journalism publishes people’s real names associated with events or topics that they’d rather not have their name attached to. Journalists shouldn’t be expected to give their sources veto-power over the publication of names. When someone says they have a safety concern associated with being identified, that doesn’t always mean that they shouldn’t be identified. It means they think there’s a risk. Journalists and editors must then decide whether the news value of the story is worth the risk.
But there’s also a difference between what people should be allowed to publish and what they should publish. Sometimes the newsworthiness of a story isn’t worth the risk. For example, the Washington Post recently published a story about a woman who wore blackface to a party two years ago. They published the woman’s real name, and as a result of the story, she lost her job. That strikes me as a case where it probably wasn’t worth it to publish a random person’s real name, given the balance between the news value of a story about a Halloween party that happened two years ago and the harm it caused the woman who was named.
These are often hard questions though. Journalists are likely to make mistakes in both directions-- granting anonymity when they shouldn’t and revealing identities when it’s really harmful. Of course, I support a culture of openness and speech and transparency, and I don’t think journalists should lose their jobs when they make a bad call and publish something they think is newsworthy. I’m just saying that there can be pretty strong moral reasons against publicizing people’s names or personal information.
In Alexander’s case, unless the news story really was about his true identity, it doesn’t seem like the news value of publishing his last name outweighs the harm Alexander says it would cause in his personal life. So they shouldn’t have planned to publish his last name. Or, if the story was about Alexander’s true identity, then it sounds like that wasn’t clearly communicated to Alexander. Either way, the NYT policy on pseudonyms is really unclear and it sounds like they made a mistake here.
This discussion of anonymity in the news also highlights the fact that reporters are always making normative judgments even if they purport to be just reporting the facts. Judgments about what is newsworthy and judgments about acceptable risk, for example, are moral judgments. To say that something is newsworthy is to say that it is the kind of information that people have an interest in knowing. To publish someone's name is to say that the value of privacy is outweighed by the value of transparency in this case.
These value judgments are unavoidable in journalism. And newspapers aren't 'more objective' when they are unclear and reticent about the moral reasoning behind their editorial judgment. If newspapers really care about transparency and accountability, as they often claim, then they should also be transparent and accountable when it comes to their own values.