Journalists - There's no such thing as a "scoop" anymore

In times long past, King Solomon was brought two women who had a serious dispute. They both claimed to be the mother of the same child, and both wished to take custody of said child.

After attempting to no avail, to reason with the women, the King posed this solution: Bring the child forward and have it cut in two. Each woman could then take half the child as their own. The thought being that the one that relented was acting out of parental love, not greediness.

Unfortunately, journalists have not only abandoned such logic, but also their love for the truth.

Pick up any paper and you will find some "shocking" story about some horrible travesty that someone is committing. The conditions of military hospitals is a great recent example of this trend.

Wouldn't it be awesome if the reporter that discovered one of these problems, actually worked
with the person / agency / whatever that had the problem BEFORE breaking the story?

Your first reaction to that statement might be disagreement. But think about it.

What if instead of breaking the story, they said to the person responsible "Look, here is what I see that is a huge problem. If you don't resolve it quickly, I'm going to go to press with it to make sure someone else does. And if you do resolve it, I'm going make sure everyone knows about that also."?

Maybe that "resolution" means someone incompetent is fired. Maybe it just means changing a policy or two. But, don't you think changes for the better are more likely to be implemented well, when the person involved isn't being called by every reporter on the planet for an interview every 15 seconds?

As the title of my blog entry states, There is no such thing as a "scoop" anymore. News spreads so quickly nobody knows who "broke" the story, and frankly, nobody even cares. So why rush it?

As a journalist, wouldn't you rather write a story showing a huge success that YOU ALONE forced to happen, or break a story about how person x was unable to resolve the problem that YOU ALONE discovered?

Apparently not, apparently journalists would rather cut the baby in two (thousand). Rather than get a true "scoop", they'd rather share a quick breaking story with everyone else in the world as quickly as they possibly can.

Fools.