Shrinking Newsrooms: Vetting Outside Work Enough?

NYT piece tomorrow, online now, from Richard Perez-Pena on trend of shrinking papers needing to rely on good outside work, such as from ProPublica, more often. But how is vetting of that work done and is it enough? Excerpt:

“There are more pressures than ever to acquire content from outside sources, and there are going to be even more going forward,” said Alan D. Mutter, a media consultant and former newspaper editor who blogs about the news business. That means that despite declining resources, newsrooms, he said, “have to get better at due diligence in terms of who this provider is,” and at explaining it to their audiences.

Some of these issues came to a head recently, when The Washington Post published an article from a newly formed news organization, The Fiscal Times, about the debate over federal spending without disclosing that the group’s financial backer is Peter G. Peterson, who has an abiding interest in the issue and ties to experts cited in the article. The Post later acknowledged that it should have disclosed the connections, and its ombudsman, Andrew Alexander, found fault with the article — though not with the underlying relationship with The Fiscal Times.