Every reporter gets beaten on a story now and then. Nobody likes it.
If the story is important and your paper doesn't have its head up its ass, then you get the information into the paper the next day for your readers, even if you have to write "according to Competing Newspaper's Name Here."
It's better if you can go get it for yourself, obviously. But your readers having the information trumps a little bruised pride.
It's what the Washington Post had to do with the Pentagon Papers stories when the NY Times had them and they didn't. It's what the NY Times had to do with much of the Watergate stuff.
The thing to be ashamed of would be pretending the story didn't exist because it was in some other publication and we didn't have it or the documents to do it ourselves.
In this case, this is something the N&R's cop reporters should have gotten into. Because of the way we were managed by our former owners we went without a full time cop reporter (not counting the night public safety position, which ends up being mostly dealing with breaking violence/accidents) for more than a year, I believe. We're breaking in new day and night cop reporters now who have been in town for only a couple of months.
Because of the way our beat structure works and the staff that's been cut to smaller numbers than you should really have on a daily, there's very little investigative journalism on this order being done at the N&R right now. It's been that way for a little while. I can count on one hand the number of stories on which I have been able to spend more than a couple of days in the last two years. Most reporters at the paper could say the same.
When your best reporters have to write 200 or more stories a year, you're occasionally going to get beat by a good reporter who has more time to devote to each story and can spend time on longer term projects. Hell, you'll even get beat by not so great reporters who just put in the time.
I think with new leadership and new owners the newsroom is going to change in a way that's going to allow us to do more investigative stuff.
Until then, I'm glad we called up Yes, congratulated them and credited them with the story when we told our readers what was going on.
Let me say this:
ReplyDeleteEvery reporter gets beaten on a story now and then. Nobody likes it.
If the story is important and your paper doesn't have its head up its ass, then you get the information into the paper the next day for your readers, even if you have to write "according to Competing Newspaper's Name Here."
It's better if you can go get it for yourself, obviously. But your readers having the information trumps a little bruised pride.
It's what the Washington Post had to do with the Pentagon Papers stories when the NY Times had them and they didn't. It's what the NY Times had to do with much of the Watergate stuff.
The thing to be ashamed of would be pretending the story didn't exist because it was in some other publication and we didn't have it or the documents to do it ourselves.
In this case, this is something the N&R's cop reporters should have gotten into. Because of the way we were managed by our former owners we went without a full time cop reporter (not counting the night public safety position, which ends up being mostly dealing with breaking violence/accidents) for more than a year, I believe. We're breaking in new day and night cop reporters now who have been in town for only a couple of months.
Because of the way our beat structure works and the staff that's been cut to smaller numbers than you should really have on a daily, there's very little investigative journalism on this order being done at the N&R right now. It's been that way for a little while. I can count on one hand the number of stories on which I have been able to spend more than a couple of days in the last two years. Most reporters at the paper could say the same.
When your best reporters have to write 200 or more stories a year, you're occasionally going to get beat by a good reporter who has more time to devote to each story and can spend time on longer term projects. Hell, you'll even get beat by not so great reporters who just put in the time.
I think with new leadership and new owners the newsroom is going to change in a way that's going to allow us to do more investigative stuff.
Until then, I'm glad we called up Yes, congratulated them and credited them with the story when we told our readers what was going on.
That's how newspapers are supposed to work.
Thanks for commenting, Joe.
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