The New York Times and the Hillary Clinton email story. What went wrong?

The problem for editors and reporters of the New York Times with the Clinton story is that they had to rely on anonymous sources in order to break news. There are only so many ways to confirm a story and sometimes anonymous sources are correct and sometimes they are not. However, the mistakes in the story are small, and we have seen since the writing of the article that if you took the information we know today of the e-mails, the initial description in the first story could be correct. The truth is that there is no way to be 100% certain that every word from your sources will be true, but as a reporter you have to make the decision to go with your sources and sometimes you will be right and sometimes you will be wrong.