Being a Good Journalist Means Learning How to Keep a Secret

The role of journalists is to make information public. The irony is that in order to do so, they need to keep lots of things secrets.     They do that in all sorts of ways. Sometimes journalists promise anonymity in order to get officials to divulge what they’re not supposed to reveal. Sometimes they cloak the exchange of sensitive documents. Sometimes they conceal the nature of their stories so that governments can’t censor their work preemptively.