Tuesday, February 01, 2005

'Owning' a breaking story

Senior journalists, who've covered just about everything, are often prone to having sudden flashbacks. Whenever that glazed look comes over their eyes, you can almost see that anecdote coming to life..

And in the course of such reminiscences, some of them talk about 'breaking stories'. Atleast twice in my short career, I've been waylaid by some boss who told me the importance of 'owning' a story. That is, you break it first, and then pull out all stops to ensure every aspect of that issue has been brought out. And of course, it has to be a story your rival channel/newspaper hasn't bothered to highlight.

Today we had a chance to to do something like that - Narain Karthikeyan announced that we would finally be getting to drive a Formula one car this season. A colleague of mine had figured out that something like this was happening and we had our coverage plan ready, right down to hourly breakdown through the day.
But the system had to cock up - an overhead broadcasting van wasn't at the press conference when Narain announced the news, BECAUSE someone higher-up had decided the story wasn't worth it. And of course we missed it, only to see our rival channel splash it all across their channel.
After 24 hours of preparing backgrounders, stings and a whole production/broadcast plan - we'd been pipped to the post.

I was of course furious - we'd been beaten at our own game. We'd missed the chequered flag, were last to breast the tape and so on. But I don't suppose our audiences noticed anything...

Isn't there supposed to be a lesson somewhere in all this?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

hmm interesting...i guess at the end of the day..our breaking stories and reports just give us an high ...does it really matter!!