The five-minute news scoop

Journalists live for a scoop. Beyond that, they’ll settle for a good story.

Truth is, in this technological age, a scoop lasts literally for about five minutes. That’s how long it takes a competitor to rip and read your story when the paper lands in their newsroom, or they hear the story on another station.

We had a scoop on the plan by Aboriginal Cogeneration Corp. to build a plant for incinerating old railway ties that didn’t even last that long. It didn’t surprise me in the least.

I’ve been in touch with Kim Sigurdson, the head of ACC, a number of times over the past several weeks. He was pretty optimistic around the middle of December that things were looking good for the Ministry of Environment to approve the permit, but by the new year it still hadn’t happened.

Then, earlier this week, it was only a matter of getting the signed document distributed to all the key parties, especially politicians. I agreed to wait until today to release anything so as not to become part of the story — politicians have been known to get cheese off enough to put a hold on signoffs if somebody talks out of turn.

By Thursday, when Sigurdson got his signed copy of the permit, there were quite a number of people in the know, from local and provincial politicians to, of course, a bunch of people in the MOE. One of them called a local radio station mid-afternoon.

I’m not interested enough to track down whether Jason Bourgeois of the MOE was the guy who phoned, though it might be a curiosity to some why civil servants play favourites with the media. In this business, one would lose sleep if you worried about such things, and I sleep very soundly, thank you.

After the story went to one of the media, others followed, including me. I posted it on our website as breaking news, and TV7 scalped enough from their competing station to get it on their dinner-time newscast.

Our front-page story today is, by far, the most comprehensive report on the matter, so in that respect the media complement each other. In this case, the loss of a scoop was almost to be expected as the number of people in the know grew. I don’t in the least regret doing it the way we did, because the worst thing in the world would have been to jump the gun and mess up the process, or simply to be wrong.

Sometimes, though, you get screwed by a source. Earlier this week, through sheer journalistic enterprise, our reporter Cam Fortems had an exclusive on the Judy Sellin lawsuit case. Out of respect for Sellin, he called her for comment. Sellin, in turn, called a local radio reporter to let him in on it. Bad form.

Back in spring, Kamloops This Week editor Chris Foulds blogged on essentially the same issue after he felt let down by Doug Wittal on the Sedric’s announcement. Foulds wondered about off-the-record conversations between reporters and sources.

Bottom line, though, is that the public doesn’t really give a rat’s patoot which station or paper gets the story first. We in the business like to do a bit of “you heard it first” bragging, but it’s mostly crappola.  In general terms, our audience benefits from healthy competition among media, but who gets the scoop is important only to us, not them.

I’ll have more comment on the ACC story in tomorrow’s Armchair Mayor column.