Opinion : The \'first\', \'best\' and \'only\' in the age of Internet-first news

"How did they write that story?"

"Where did they get that information?"

"To whom did they speak?"

"What sources did they use?"

Long before I became a journalist, I was asking those questions, especially when reading a long or complex story.

I still ask those questions now, but sometimes, I admit, it's in a negative or grumpy way. At times, I read a story in another newspaper, or see something on the TV news and wonder, "Who cares?" or "Why is this in the news?" or "Why would someone write that?"

I haven't always been this outspoken about what I perceive to be the mistakes of others.

I was a very shy person as a teenager, so it startled me on the day when as a young adult, someone asked me a question about the latest issue, and soon I realized that everyone in the room was listening to me. I don't remember exactly what the issue was but I do remember how odd it felt to have everyone's attention.

The situation is different now, more than 25 years later, but I find myself a bit startled again to see that people are paying attention.

But this time, they are paying attention to what I write.

It's fun, flattering, and also enlightening.

Here is one example:

Early May. A Friday afternoon. A few days earlier, downtown Vinton had been swarming with law enforcement personnel. But nobody was talking about why they were there. Then some producer for a TV show finds out about gold bars hidden in CD cases, and other items hidden in a few local locations. Soon, Vinton was again swarming with television cameras and reporters scrambling to give you information that you had already seen Vinton Today (which is where the producer learned about the story himself).

Another example:

Early August. Monday afternoon.

Another company that likes to boast about its coverage of Vinton has been reading my stories about the Peony case for the past several months. They were tired of giving you the news about the case several days after you read it in Vinton Today. So they came up with a plan.

They sent two people -- one of them the main boss -- from their corporate headquarters two counties away to cover the sentencing. Then when the hearing was over, one of them called a third person, who was waiting by the phone at their office.

The result: That company was able (by using three employees, several man-hours and 200 miles of driving) to put on its web site a 4-paragraph story about the sentencing hearing approximately 15-30 minutes before you could read on Vinton Today a full story about the sentencing and its impact on the restaurant's future.

Then, and hour later, that company replaced its story with a press release from the U.S. Attorney's Office.

I had to laugh when I saw this; I thought, "It took three people and a 3-hour drive to get a press release on a web site? Any other company could have done that with one person sitting at his desk." They did, however, update their web site the next day, after running a new story about the sentencing in their paper.

(By the way, you probably did not see much about the hearing on TV because the TV crews were at the same federal courthouse that same day to cover a story about a Dubuque teacher who pleaded guilty to child porn charges; they had heard the hearing was set for Monday, but it ended up being on Tuesday. Cameras are not allowed in the court building, although I saw one camera man outside, trying to get a shot of.. something.)

Earlier this summer, one of the newspapers associated with those TV reporters was sending salesmen to Vinton, offering free copies of their newspaper, letting you know that they, too, offer news about Vinton. One of them offered me a copy. No, Thanks, I said.

First vs. Best

The TV people were tripping over each other, trying to get the story on the Dubuque guy because it is very important to many people to say they they were the "first" to "break" a story.

That's silly.

Remember the Martha Stewart trial? Reporters took two differently-colored handkerchiefs with them into the courtroom. One color stood for guilty; the other, not-guilty. When the verdict was read, the reporters ran to the courthouse door, waving their handkerchiefs, in an effort to make their news team the "first" to announce the verdict.

Silly. Really silly.

The same thing happened in the Gore-Bush court thing following the election of 2000. A reporter stood outside a courthouse, holding a thick legal document, trying to make sense of it while reporting the news.

He even said so. On camera.

"I am trying to figure out what this means," he said, turning a page.

What he should have done is sat down with a legal expert for an hour or two, review the court case and then explain it.

What he did, instead, was stand there saying, "I am trying to make sense of this."

He did this because his producers wanted to be "first," even if being first meant standing cluelessly in front of a courthouse.

Our advantage

On the first Friday in August, someone sent me a link to a story that announces that an Iowa newspaper is going to start putting obituaries on its web site the same day that it receives them.

I had to laugh again. We've always done that here at Vinton Today. And we do it for free.

I am not saying we are smarter or better or faster than anyone I mentioned above; it's just that when you are a local news organization that has nothing to do but put stories about one area on one web site, you have a lot of advantages over just about everyone else.

The technology will continue to change, but the principal will always stay the same: People want to know the "who, what, where, when, how and why" about their place, as quickly their journalists can share it with them.

Why does Vinton Today work? Simple: Because we give you news about Vinton, today, that you can't get anywhere else in the world. And we can do that sooner and better then just about everyone else simply because it's all that we do.