Advertisement

Pack journalism, and a timely lesson about social media

One question I'm often asked is this: Where do you come up with your story ideas? I often tell people the explosion of social media has opened up new nooks and crannies for reporters to find out what's happening, to discover different stories, and to see what real people are up to —not just governments and organizations.

Sometimes it can mean new fresh stories, with different reporters uncovering new stories to share with viewers, readers and listeners in a province that's always hungry for a good yarn.

Sometimes, though, it seems that who journalists are following the most closely are each other.

News now, 24-7

You don't have to wait until tomorrow's paper to know what the Telegram (or anyone else) is working on; you can follow their reporters on Twitter … and try and get the information out first.

We're in an online "news now" world where deadlines have gone from being measured in days to minutes.

When a friend of mine posted a story on Facebook this week about Sudbury being the fattest city in the country, I knew St. John's couldn't be far behind. The CBC story linked to the Statistics Canada information and sure enough, we're #3! As a province we're the biggest, and not in a good way.

I sent out the link to my colleagues in the CBC newsroom, thinking it would make a good story.

I also tweeted it out, since every reporter wants to be the first to get a good conversation going.

The story was noticed, as it turns out, mostly by other journalists. By the next morning VOCM had the headline "St. John's Third Fattest City in Canada," quoting a "new report by Statistics Canada" (I handily linked people directly to the report).

Later, Health Minister Steve Kent and Dr. Faith Stratton, the chief medical officer of health, were talking to reporters about Ebola, but later colleagues from NTV and the Telegram wanted to talk obesity.

At this point, you may be thinking, "Hey Peter, if you noticed these stats, surely the other conscientious reporters could find them too."

Except that the new report wasn't actually new.

Um, oops

As a helpful fellow reporter in our newsroom pointed out, the date at the bottom showed that StatsCan released those sobering size stats no less than five months ago.

Like many others, I didn't check the date stamp before tweeting it out. I had unwittingly spread the virus of old information to my reporter colleagues.

I'll admit I was amused to watch the story grow from the seed I planted on Twitter the night before to taking over a news conference the next day.

Nobody wants to miss out on a good story, to have a producer or editor yell across the newsroom "Why didn't we have this!"

I'm not immune to this. I follow lots of fellow reporters on Twitter and if I think they have a good story, I'll pick up the phone to try and match it. But that instinct may be hurting journalism instead of helping it.

Sadly, in this day of shrinking newsrooms it means there are fewer people chasing fewer stories.

It's a reminder to me as a journalist to spend less time keeping an eye on my colleagues and more time looking for stories in places others aren't.

And next time I'll look more closely before I eagerly share the next nugget of news.