One of my favorite stories focuses on how we scooped the local newspaper in reporting the identity of our city’s new schools superintendent before his identity was officially announced, and how we landed great photographs for the story, too.
It started with a mention in a Northern California newspaper that their schools superintendent had just announced he was leaving to head the Pasadena Unified School District. Since we search the web virtually hourly for references to Pasadena, this item popped up and one of our human researchers in India, who was on web watch duty, escalated the story to me almost immediately.
I knew we had a crack at scooping all local media if we moved fast. While I placed a call to the purportedly incoming superintendent’s office, I directed our offshore researchers to start searching the internet for references to him in blogs, official school websites, and the newspapers in his area to build a profile.
When I called his office, his secretary said, “Uh-oh, it’s starting! You’re the first call.”
The superindent was not available (for most of that afternoon) but we were able report to our readers that Edwin Diaz of the Gilroy school district had been identified by the Gilroy Dispatch as Pasadena’s new school superintendent, that we had not yet spoken to Diaz and thus could not confirm the report, although Mr. Diaz’s secretary had confirmed the report. We promised to provide further information as it became available.
While we researched questions to ask Mr. Diaz, we contacted the Gilroy Dispatch to request a file photo. They refused to provide one. I directed my offshore research team to start telephoning service organizations in Gilroy (the Rotary Club, Kiwanis, Elks, etc.) as well as local photographers to try to score some photos of Mr. Diaz. They hit pay dirt: the Rotarians’ photographer had shot a large number of great photographs of Diaz interacting with local schoolchildren. The photographer had rights to the images and permissions from the children’s parents and guardians, and he was happy to let us use the photos for free in exhange for credit attribution only.
I worked to contact local Board of Education members to confirm the story, but no one contacted would comment.
Meanwhile, my co-publisher had spoken with Mr. Diaz and recorded a telephone interview. We ran a brief story that Diaz said he was the incoming superintendent, with a few quotes and one of the photographs we now had received. While we were prepping that story, we used Amazon Mturk to get a transcription prepared of the entire interview in order to run a more complete feature story, which would include comments made by Diaz about his position on local topics (charter schools, police on campus, etc.)
Our final product that day was exactly that – a longer story with confirmation by local authorities that Diaz was to be the new superintendent, plus lengthier quotes and comments by Diaz on his positions on a number of topics, all surrounded by great photographs of him interacting with students in Gilroy. Our research team contributed remarks and comments from others in Gilroy, both positive and negative, with attribution.
We were able to detect an important story and react quickly. Our entire process produced excellent, breaking news reporting with robust research and great photography at very little cost.
The keys to our process: (1) Carefully monitoring OSINT (open source intelligence, that is, data available freely online). (2) Having a system to identify important stories and to escalate them immediately; (3) Having a low-cost team of web researchers which can swing into action quickly and who have the ability to telephone the US to develop information; (4) Using Amazon Mturk or another method to transcribe recorded interviews fast; (5) Having an editor ready to take charge and run the operation in real time, staying in touch with researchers overseas and reporters in his or her own city.
Posted on April 25, 2010
0