When to be tough and when to be tender: Source cultivation tradecraft among award-winning Canadian investigative journalists

Investigative journalists depend on human sources, yet the sustained work of building and protecting those relationships has received less scholarly attention than its centrality to the craft would suggest. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 17 award-winning Canadian investigative journalists, conducted on the record and named with consent, this study examines how elite reporters cultivate, verify and safeguard sources. Six themes describe source cultivation as an integrated tradecraft rather than a discrete skill: tacit knowledge as an engine of access, an asymmetric ethics of toughness and care, triangulation architectures for credibility, cultivation as slow journalism, source protection as embedded practice, and the interplay of public records and human sources. Two contributions extend existing scholarship. First, participants apply ethical obligations asymmetrically, sorting sources by relative power and treating care as a structuring logic that runs through interview design and publication decisions. Second, documentary and human sourcing operate as functionally inseparable rather than parallel evidentiary streams. Points of divergence within the cohort are also documented.