Keith Pompey at the Inquirer was on a Toronto Raptors podcast:

“The people used to reach out to me.. that was one of my best sources of all time. ‘Such and such is going to happen today,’ and so I would write it. First you would verify it, then all of a sudden you’re like, how come nobody’s upset?”

Good idea or bad idea to admit this? Keith says he worked to verify the information coming in from the burner account(s), so that’s the key takeaway here. If you can get a 2nd or 3rd source on it, then that’s “best practice,” as they say in the corporate world. But taking info from anonymous people at face value, with no vetting? Then you’re in useful idiot territory.

That’s not to say that anonymous accounts can’t be legitimate sources. There are instances when you can make it work, Crossing Broad’s mystery Eagles source being a good example. In that case, we didn’t know the person who was contacting us, but we were able to test drive some of the information. I remember he/she told us one or two things, we didn’t report it, and both tidbits ended up being true. So the 3rd and 4th thing they gave us, we reported that because the source had proven that they knew what they were talking about. The concern, of course, is that you’re getting played by someone in the front office, and being used as a conduit for leakage, to serve a purpose and put a specific narrative out there. We didn’t think that was the case with the Eagles, since Howie Roseman allegedly goes to Schefty and the national guys, and the local beats rarely break news. Why would anyone come to Crossing Broad anonymously to spin a narrative anyway? We were later able to ID the mystery source, so it was all buttoned up.

In Keith’s case, I guess he’s the only one who knows if he was compromised or not. You’d have to go back and look through stories from 2016 to 2018 to determine if there was any common slant to his reporting. I don’t remember if what he wrote back then was anti-Sixers or pro-Sixers or if there was a consistent theme to it. The hardcore Sixers fans probably remember. It’s one thing to verify the information coming from a rando, but if it was consistently anti-Joel Embiid or anti-Sam Hinkie or whatever Colangelo was complaining about back then (most of it has been purged from memory), then yeah, you’d be guilty of amplifying someone’s personal agenda. It’s a complicated thing, but serves to illustrate that there really are no hard and fast journalism rules these days. It’s the wild west. You take your information where you can get it. If it’s good, it’s good, and if it’s not, then you’re at risk of having to put on the dunce cap and sit in the corner.