Swisher gets her scoops by working harder than you

Beet.TV
Andy Plesser spoke to All Thing D‘s Kara Swisher after she won a Loeb Award for liveblogging Yahoo’s earnings calls. (“I kind of took a lot of pokes at the management when they would say things that were inaccurate and I would point them out.”) He asked her in a video interview about the Loebs having a separate award for blogging. Her response:

The difference between blogging and journalism is becoming almost negligible. We were talking about that — they shouldn’t be called bloggers, because they are reporters. We’re reporters. We break news. We broke the Myspace story, we broke the Google/Groupon story. We break stories. We compete with journalists. I was a journalist. But you know they still think there’s enough difference between bloggers and regular reporters that there should be a different designation [in the Loeb Awards]. I think in the future that’s not going to be the case because blogging is increasing in quality and importance and it’s sort of running right into reporting, so I don’t see that there’s a difference. But I’m glad to have won. I have a lovely crystal globe to prove that I’m an award winner.

Plesser asks Swisher how she get her scoops.

Well I use a lot of tasers and threats – idle threats. Someone asked me this the other day, they say how do you get so many scoops? And I’m like, I work harder than you, I call more people, I follow up. I’m kind of relentless in terms of making calls, building sources, creating relationships. When I hear a small thing I follow it up. I think there’s no trick to great reporting, it’s just being curious, following things up, developing sources and not just putting up whatever idle rumor is around. We don’t do that. When we write something it’s going to happen. We spend a lot of time on accuracy, on credibility, on truthfulness, and on being right about what we say is going to happen.

Swisher writes in comments below: “you do realize I was referencing one whiny lazy person who was trying to determine how I beat them all the time! a lot of folks work harder than me. frankly, though, the tasers work best.”