The Dufferin standoff — the end of media competition?

Very busy in the newsroom this morning. People gradually showing up for work — some were up all night covering the Dufferin standoff that went on for several hours and ended in the early morning with an explosion in the house that police had surrounded since late afternoon.

Cam Fortems, who was there pretty much throughout, just arrived (10:30 a.m.), Mark Rogers, who was updating our website during the night, is here, too. So are Michele Young and Tracy Gilchrist. I think photographers Murray Mitchell and Keith Anderson are sleeping in — deservedly so. Me, I got to leave for home just after 9:30 p.m., though the trip was slightly delayed when I almost ran into a couple of horses that had gotten loose on the road from a neighbour’s place, and I had to stop to let them know about the strays.

One of the reasons the phone is ringing this morning is that out-of-town media are hungry for photos, as they were last night. In the old days, we’d think twice about giving away our material but it’s different now. In this Internet age, things move quickly. There are no more scoops. Everybody shares with everybody.

There will come a time, in the not-too-distant future, that we’ll be desperately looking for pictures and information on a story, and we’ll ask CBC, or CTV, or the Vancouver Sun or Province, or some other media outlet, to share with us what they’ve got. And they’ll send it along or let us grab it off their website.

A couple of serious highway accidents last winter, too far from us to get to, are good examples. We asked for, and got, what some of the other media had. There’s a bit of a code of conduct in these things — it’s polite to call the other guy and ask if it’s OK to use his material. All such material, after all, is copyrighted. But if nobody’s available at the other end, there’s an understanding that we’re all in this together and it’s not the end of the world if we just use it without their direct permission, because we have these verbal understandings.

The only must-do is to give the other media outlet credit. This morning, a TV station was on the line asking for more photos of last night’s tragic incident in Dufferin — and apologizing for not having given us credit for the use of our video last night.

Is this the end of competition in the media? Yes and no. We all still try to get the story first, and there’s less co-operation among media within the city than between local media and those in other centres. But exclusives are rare, and the public gets the benefit.