First, a word of advice to anyone who might find themselves being interviewed by a reporter on a sensitive or controversial matter: “Off the record” is a two-way verbal contract that must be struck before the interview begins.

More than once in my career, I’ve had the displeasure of talking to someone for several minutes, they gushing important details and answering all of my questions and me furiously taking notes, only for them to say, at the very end, “Now, this is all off the record, right?”

That puts the reporter and the source in the awkward position of having to negotiate the terms of the interview after the fact, when the reporter already has all the goods in their lap. Sometimes, when the information is solid or particularly important to the public interest, a reporter just has to tell their sources they’d never agreed to go off the record and print it.

That angers the source, possibly burning a bridge or two, and nobody wants that.

It’s a two-way street: A reporter shouldn’t print something someone utters casually over drinks at the bar, unaware they’re talking to a journalist. But if the reporter has identified himself or herself as a journalist, sources should consider themselves on the record unless the reporter agrees they’re off.

There are all kinds of legitimate reasons for a source to go off the record, which means a reporter can’t print the information with attribution (meaning they can’t print it at all in newspapers, such as The News, with strict policies against anonymous sources).

Maybe the source isn’t authorized to share the information, and doing so might jeopardize their career. Maybe they don’t want to imperil a criminal case or pending business deal by putting the information out too early. Maybe they know that, if the news got out with their name attached to it, it would pick a fight they’re not ready to pick.

Whatever the reason, off-the-record conversations can be a useful tool for a reporter.

Knowledge is power, and sometimes knowing something, even if you can’t print it, helps you further a story. You can ask the right questions of the right people, submit public records requests for the right kinds of documents, show up at the right place at the right time.

Shortly before I left the Lansing State Journal, for example, a source called to tell me, off the record, that a supervisor at the state child welfare office in Traverse City had been arrested for drunk driving. Bombshell of a story, because of its sheer hypocrisy: The supervisor had the authority to remove children from their parents and place them in foster care, drunk driving being one of many factors that could launch removal proceedings.

I wasn’t able to report what the source had said, but I was able to use the information to file requests through the Freedom of Information Act for the supervisor’s arrest report from the Traverse City Police Department and her personnel file from the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services, and put the story together that way (I did get scooped by the Traverse City Record-Eagle, whose reporters had a preexisting relationship with their city’s police).

Off-the-record information can put you off of a story, too. I’ve been in the position, on more than one occasion, in which a competitor posted a story but I didn’t because I had off-the-record information that the story was incorrect. You look like a fool for a while, seeming to get scooped left and right, but the truth almost always prevails in the end.

Occasionally, others — rarely a competing news outlet, usually regular Joes and Janes on social media — will violate whatever codes of confidence they may have shared with a source and will publish — again, typically on social media — information that may or may not be true, and they’ll follow it up with a dig on their local paper for supposedly withholding those details.

Sometimes, newspapers don’t publish information because its journalists haven’t been able to verify it.

Other times, it’s because we learned that information in an off-the-record conversation, and we want to maintain the trust of our sources.

Journalism is a long game. We’re OK with giving social media folks their day of commentary today because we know we’ll have the better story tomorrow.

Sources learn to trust reporters when they know they can share information without it automatically appearing in blaring headlines in the next day’s paper. When sources trust reporters, they tend to share more information in the future, and — for the all the reasons I’ve outlined here — that can often lead to better, deeper, more comprehensive and ultimately truer stories down the line.

And it always better to be right than to be first.

Justin A. Hinkley can be reached at 989-358-5686 or jhinkley@thealpenanews.com. Follow him on Twitter @JustinHinkley.