When reporting a complicated story with numerous sources, try to quote your sources—either one or two or three times—but by themselves. Once you have moved on to quote another source, don’t come back to quote a previous source.
This may require you to think a bit more, but it will usually make your story flow more smoothly.
It will force you, the reporter, to explain the story more clearly and only use your sources’ quotes as examples for what has already been stated, not to introduce new information.
Otherwise, your story can come to look like a list of quotes with readers trying to remember who each source is when you keep coming back to quote them at various points in the story.
Yes there are exceptions, and about the only exception I like is to come back to one source at the end of a long story….if needed. And if you do, remind the readers of who that person is. No need to give the formal title again, but give a generic reminder of who they are. Example…..the first time a source is named in a story is Ting Wu, assistant professor for genetics at Harvard Medical School. If she is repeated at the end of the story, write something like: “For Wu, the Harvard geneticist, the issue remains…”
Here is a story that took me weeks to report and probably two weeks to write (among my other duties at the time). Notice I never come back to a source. This was a hard feat to accomplish in explaining this complicated issue, but it was worth the effort. I received many compliments on how well the story flowed and for such smooth transitions.
(sorry about the “comprised of”…it should have been “composed of”)
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