No, this is not a prostate problem story: It focuses on the ethical swamp of background briefings and "anonymous" leaks that many journalists find themselves wading through on a daily basis.

An excerpt from NYT public editor Daniel Okrent's column:

SOMETIME in the next few days The Times's staff will be presented a statement titled "Preserving Our Readers' Trust." Prepared by a committee of reporters and editors led by assistant managing editor Allan M. Siegal, the document will offer recommendations addressing such subjects as sourcing, bias, the division between news and opinion, and communication with readers. Staff members will be invited to comment, and then executive editor Bill Keller will determine which recommendations to adopt, adapt or dismiss.

I haven't seen the recommendations, but I suspect that those having to do with anonymous sources will be the most controversial among the reporting staff. Reporters who work the corridors of criminal justice, the foreign policy world and the intelligence community cannot do their jobs without unidentified sources. Many who cover those twin cesspools of duplicity, self-regard and back-stabbing - Hollywood and politics - are addicted to the practice. And implicit in much of the criticism aimed at any journalist who uses a blind quote is the unpleasant suggestion of dishonorable behavior.

Since I've been in this job, use of anonymous sources has been the substantive issue raised most often by readers. They challenge the authenticity of quotations. They question the accuracy of the information in the quotations. They believe reporters who invoke unidentified sources are lazy or, far worse, dishonest. As Leonard Wortzel of Atlanta wrote, "Whenever I come across a phrase like 'according to a high-ranking official,' I translate it to mean, 'I, the reporter, will now state my opinion and disguise it as news.' "

Reporters bristle when they hear this sort of thing, just as you would if your integrity were challenged. But I don't think it matters if it's fair or not. If readers perceive deception or dishonesty, The Times has a problem.

The paper knows it; that's why the Siegal group, generally referred to as "the credibility committee," was convened. That's why Philip Taubman, the Washington bureau chief, informed his staff last week that The Times had joined a group of news organizations in a broad effort to reverse the flood of "background briefings" in Washington, where officials hand out their version of events and policies and are allowed to remain unseen by the paper's readers.

Credibility is also why many reporters will now acknowledge that the profession's worst habits must be broken - the vague descriptions of phantom sources, the readiness to disregard their motivations, the willingness to let them say what they wish without public accountability. White House correspondent David E. Sanger, much of whose recent work has been in the extremely sensitive area of nuclear proliferation, told me, "In the post-Iraq world" - the world in which artful leakers convinced reporters and their readers that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction - "using identifiers like 'intelligence officials' or 'officials with access to intelligence' just doesn't hack it."

The piece goes on to have bureaucrats explain why background sourcing is important to them.

These paragraphs also resonated:

There is also value to unattributed material that comes from what Pentagon reporter Thom Shanker calls "not a leak but a puncture." Shanker explains: "What may look like a coherent story based on information from a single source actually represents days of work stringing together separate facts from lots of people. The sources are extensive; the motivations vary. Some were not 'motivated' at all; they did not even know they were contributing an important fact, which was only important when placed alongside other observations gathered during the course of many conversations with many other people."

This isn't overreliance on anonymous sourcing; this is what's called "reporting." It's what separates journalists from stenographers, and I'm all for it.