It's exclusive content, it says 'you have to come to us to get the full story', and it generates revenue and kudos. A reporter who can produce regular, strong scoops never has to look far for work in this business, because everybody wants a bit of that.
It can still be hard in this age of decimated newsrooms, where everybody is busy enough just covering the big stories of the day to even think about following up their own stuff, but there is still plenty out there.
The big papers, like the NZ Herald, the Dom Post, the Press and the ODT produce exclusive stories every day, and have investigative teams that are producing great and important work that nobody else is even thinking about on a regular basis. Radio NZ has a bunch of fine reporters who get new content for Morning Report and Checkpoint day after day. Every now and then, the current affairs magazines take a break from telling baby boomers how they are going to die to produce pieces that everybody else is suddenly struggling to follow up on. Even the daily news TV shows squeeze in the odd good scoop - reporters like Michael Morrah at TV3 are producing tonnes of great exclusives all the damn time.
But now that everything is shared and embedded and ripped off, it can be hard to hold onto that exclusivity for long, and the most important scoops do get taken over by other organisations.
At first , there are the straight rip-offs, or, as they are technically termed - 'a matcher', where a big story broken by a single organisation is reported by everybody else, with all the grace and ethics of a pair of seagulls fighting over a tossed kebab.
There are still a number of unspoken rules that are still quite clear - if it's all coming from one place, you should always, always attribute that source, and it's only polite to throw them a link in any web story, even if they are vile competitors. Do not just copy and paste somebody else's work - that's straight-up plagiarism - but if you can't confirm your own facts, summarise the other story, with the explicit implication that the full story will be found at the original source.
Then, a really big story will gain legs, and keep going on its own. Nobody forgets where it started, but there will be more reaction, more analysis, more taking the whole thing forward.
Losing control of a story to everybody isn't necessarily a bad thing, the big stories do need to spread around, and even the biggest media organisation can see interest flag and die if nobody else ever picks it up. And some of these exclusive stories require real societal change that is far bigger than any one organisation, and become part of the overall media sphere in order to get a result.
In recent weeks, there have been a couple of fine examples of this. The latest Hager/Stephenson book has already spawned a small tsunami of he said/he said at our highest levels of government, while the Newsroom website has started off with a couple of crackers - on the truthiness of free range eggs and more dodgy goings-on at Gloriavale.
These stories started from a single place, but have now spread to all parts of the media landscape, too big for a couple of books authors or a keen young organisation. Again, nobody forgets where they started, but holding onto an actual scoop is an exercise in futility. Set them free and let them fly.
- Katherine Grant
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