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Topic: Letters Sent to Romenesko
Date/Time: 7/16/2009 3:25:58 PM
Title: Hardly a "scoop"
Posted By: Jim Romenesko
 
From CASEY SEILER, State Editor, Albany Times Union: Here's a note I sent yesterday to James Ledbetter at The Big Money after reading the item you linked as "Why uphold an embargo if the news has been reported?"

Marc Gunther's story -- a fine and comprehensive report -- wasn't exactly the "scoop" Ledbetter claims: Our environmental reporter Brian Nearing did a long Sunday piece on the same program about three months ago. We gave it big play on our Sunday front and sent it over the Hearst wire.

I sent this note 24 hours ago, and got a quick response from Ledbetter
thanking me and noting that he'd take a look. So far, his original post
hasn't changed at all, which ticks me off a little.

No, wait -- it ticks me off a lot, especially considering Ledbetter's
withering charge that while "environmental blogs ... as well as social media sites and aggregators like the Huffington Post" had picked up Gunther's story, "So far, though, no large mainstream news organization is linking to the TBM story -- not the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, or any daily paper, or big TV network, or national magazine."

(Ledbetter charges those entities with self-censorship out of fear of
cheesing off Wal-Mart's press embargo. I can assure you that at no time in the production of Brian's story did either of us raise a concern about
hurting the retailers' feelings.)

Ledbetter moved quickly to amend his post on Wednesday morning after the Wall Street Journal linked to Gunther's story. He's been a bit more, well, deliberate in giving Nearing any credit for our April 12 piece -- which, as far as I can tell, was a genuine scoop.

In the scope of things, this isn't a big deal. But I've recently watched a
number of complex stories that my paper's journalists have invested time and resources chasing down get picked up by larger media outfits without any acknowledgement of the work that went into breaking them.

I'm certainly not charging that Gunther picked up Nearing's story and came back at it, only to have Ledbetter mislabel it as a scoop. But for Ledbetter to continue to charge that the bad old mainstream media are ignoring a potentially transformational environmental story when he's been informed that not only did our paper devote a great deal of ink/bytes to it, but we did it three months before his outfit did, is just a bit much.

I think it was Hyman Roth who said, "This is the business we've chosen" -- but still. [Permalink]

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