Your Tip Now Tells You How It Ended

Here is what filing a tip used to feel like. You'd write something up on the tip page, hit send, get a cheerful "Schefter's got it" — and then nothing. Maybe a rumor showed up on the feed a few hours later. Maybe it never did. There was no way to tell the difference between a tip Schefter passed on and a tip line that had quietly stopped working, which is a rough way to treat the people doing the reporting.

So your record card now shows a receipt for your most recent tip, and it says one of three things. It made the wire — with a link straight to the rumor it became. It got spiked — Schefter ran it, couldn't find an angle he was willing to print, and let it go. Or it aged out — nothing wrong with the tip, the wire was just quiet and it never got picked up before it expired.

The spiked note is the useful one, because it comes with the actual editorial standard attached: tips carrying a name, a number, or a deadline clear the bar far more often than tips carrying a vibe. "Somebody's shopping a receiver" is a shrug. "They want a second for the receiver before Sunday" is a story.

Nothing about this touches your anonymity. The receipt is filed against the same one-way hash your codename hangs on, it only ever loads for you, and it clears itself out after two weeks. Schefter still doesn't know who you are, and neither do we.