Going to the Source: Dallas Paper Uses Footnotes in Print

By: Jennifer Saba As the legions of eagle-eyed media critics and fact-checkers grow, newspapers often promise more "transparency." Footnoting in certain newspaper articles has been used online on occasion in recent years, but rarely in print. The Dallas Morning News in recent days embraced the idea in a big way.

"Mary Ellen's will: The battle for 4949 Swiss" is a four-part series based on Mary Ellen Bendtsen, a Texas-version of Miss Havisham, a feeble eccentric who tries to hold on to her decrepit Dallas mansion. It ran Aug. 13 through Aug. 20 and it contained 132 eye-glazing annotations. You can check out the articles here.

The series, by enterprise reporter Lee Hancock, was written in a style more common to magazines. As such, Hancock and her editors didn?t want to lard the very complicated and compelling narrative with a bunch of quotes and attributions (though those are in the story). ?You don?t want it to read like medicine,? Hancock explained.

Adopting a more literary voice didn?t snuff out the concern over transparency. ?I had been thinking all along that we needed to do something beyond a source note,? said Mark Miller, assistant managing editor for Sunday and enterprise reporting. ?The nature of the story required a lot of reporting and the use of lots of documents and transcripts."

Hancock did exhaustive research for the articles, which on the face is about an elderly belle stuck in the 1940s but dives into the little-covered subject of those who prey on the old and the legal system ill-equipped to protect them. Hancock was not deterred by the idea of annotating the series. She was trained to source everything in college: ?I confess, I was a British history major,? she said. ?I don?t want to be pedantic but anytime we can offer readers transparency ? it can add value.?

In print, the notes are located after each chapter. Online, a reader can actually click on a footnote number, which triggers a pop-up window filled with meticulous sourcing.

The best part: the pop-up windows include much of the documentation used for the series, everything from old newspaper clippings, magazines articles, court and medical records in downloadable PDFs.

Originally, Miller and the team wanted to include the footnotes online only. ?Once we started the process we realized that if online readers deserved it, so do readers of the paper,? Miller said.

From time to time, papers have used footnotes especially when writers veer into a literary voice. Chip Scanlan, a faculty member at The Poynter Institute who has written on this subject, said the first time he noticed detailed source notes was in The Wall Street Journal. The paper ran a story on Oct. 11, 2001 about five people caught in the Twin Towers on 9/11.

The Los Angeles Times annotated the Pulitzer-prize winning series ?Enrique?s Journey.? And The Providence (R.I.) Journal, the sister paper to the Dallas Morning News, has also used detailed sidebars with sourcing information.

The rise of footnotes, Scanlan explained, is a way for papers to ward off questions about potential fabrications, especially since beginning in the late 1990s a whole slew of reporters were exposed as phonies.

?Personally I love footnotes,? Scanlan said. ?[People] appreciate getting a window on the reporting and writing process. A lot of people not only distrust the media but thinks the media just makes stuff up.?

The reaction to ?Mary Ellen?s will? has been extremely positive, Miller said. ?There have been some readers that wrote in and said [the footnotes] were window dressing and what was the point,? Miller said, but overall people appreciated the detail.

?I ended up feeling better about our industry at the end of it,? he said. ?It showed that people are still reading the print paper and still responding to it.?