So, every time you see me out and about of late, you note that I have a confused look about me. The hanging jaw, the squint of befuddlement, the overall comportment of a fellow who’s lost his way.
You assume that I bought the wrong size boxer shorts again, but it’s not so. Not this time. I’m going to explain myself with three simple examples.
On an otherwise dull Wednesday night, a man in Lewiston was stabbed in the gut while getting a haircut downtown. I spent most of that night lurking in an alley down there trying to get a handle on the situation. When I got back to the office, cold and discouraged, an editor beckoned me over. “Call the TV news station,” she said, “and fill them in on what you’ve got.”
So I did, sharing details of what I’d learned like one cherubic child sharing his toys with another.
A few weeks ago, an esteemed county sheriff was accused of taking lurid pictures of himself and sending them along to the girlfriend of a deputy. Ugly stuff. Tantalizing stuff. The TV news guys got this one first and I got another command from an editor.
“Call the TV news station,” he said. “And have them fill you in.”
When a woman accidentally backed over her child, killing him, this past summer, we liberally shared our stories with the Portland Press Herald. We gave them details they didn’t have. They gave us details that had eluded us. It was one big orgy of sharing and it worked well. We made the Herald’s stories more complete, they rounded out ours.
It’s a good system, I suppose. In a day when news spreads at the speed of social media, the united front keeps us ahead of things.
It does, however, leave me with a question that burns like snow down the front of my pants: Who is my competition these days? When I’m racing off to the burning, bullets-flying, knife-gleaming drama of the breaking news scene, exactly who is it that I’m trying to outpace?
In the old days (he said, sounding more and more like a bitter old crank), it was simple. If you were employed by the Lewiston Sun Journal, you hustled along as quickly as possible in order to beat every other news organization to the juiciest details.
You wanted to scoop that pretty boy from WGME for sure because otherwise, his gloating would be unbearable. You wanted to stay ahead of that streetwise lass from Channel 8 and you definitely wanted to smack that interloper from the Press Herald. Newspaper guys coming in from another city to encroach on your crime scene? Oh, haaayall no!
Competition came at you from all angles, and the spirit of it compelled a young reporter to work harder, work longer and work sharper. Getting scooped by the TV guys, after all, would absolutely cover you in a stink of shame that wouldn’t wash off for years. Scooping them, on the other hand, would bring about such a soaring sense of glory, you’d insist on a Roman-style triumph, if your editors would spring for the cost (note: They wouldn’t. Wouldn’t even let you parade a papier-mache mock-up of that TV anchor’s head around the newsroom.)
Today, though, we all seem to be clinging to the same ragged lifeboat on this churning sea of fast and frantic news: TV people and print guys alike. There are company mergers, big business buyouts and all sorts of corporate inbreeding. Competitors you reviled yesterday are suddenly your stepbrothers and everybody has to get along.
Sharing news with a TV station — or worse yet, with another newspaper — has a vaguely incestuous feel to it, like sneaking a kiss from that pretty cousin you have weird feelings about.
I can’t even say for sure that the old way worked better. I can only say that it FELT better, from a reporter’s perspective. Day after day, battling like mad to outpace, outwit and outdo those TV weasels or those encroaching bums out of Portland. It was energizing.
I would expect that the encroaching bums out of Portland felt the same way about us.
These days, we contend with a population of curious bystanders armed with cellphone cameras and instant links to Twitter and Facebook, Snapchat and Reddit, Instagram and NewsaWhoozit.
Say what you want about the amateur nature of citizen journalism, but they’ve got the numbers, they’ve got the will and they’ve got the freedom to report things, unfettered by editorial guidelines or pesky ethics.
The professional journalist can’t get it faster than the average eager beaver on the street, so he has to make sure he does it better. That’s something, at least. It’s just not the kind of something that inspires a Roman triumph, with crowns, gold-laced togas and burning sacrifices to various idols.
News reporting just ain’t the same, is all I’m saying. Now, get about looking up the social media giant NewsaWhoozit because you know you really want to. It’s a thriving service. I think you’re going to get a lot out of it.
Mark LaFlamme is a Sun Journal staff writer being aggressively head-hunted by NewsaWhoozit. Email him at mlaflamme@sunjournal.com.
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