Anatomy Of A Breaking New Story

Working under a weekly deadline has its plusses and minuses. This week’s big story, the announcement of the pending sale of Chatham Bars Inn for a record $166 million, illustrates both.
Clearly a story of great importance to the Chatham community. In fact we’d heard that the inn was to be sold the previous day, just hours before we had to finalize that week’s issue. The news came in from several sources, all either as rumor off-the-record responses to inquiries.
I contacted CBI’s parent company, once we waded through the levels of corporate ownership and identified the correct entity, but the person designated to speak to the press was not available. We had to make a decision, to either run with the unconfirmed reports of the inn’s sale or hold off until we received confirmation.
At this stage all we knew was that there was some sort of agreement to sell the inn to a buyer whose identity had yet to be established. We’d heard rumors like this before, related to CBI and other major properties. This time we were certain that the rumors were true --- because of off-the-record confirmation --- though we had little detail. Going with the unconfirmed story still carried some risk.
Understand, Cape Cod media, plucked and purged as it has been by corporate mergers and closings, is still competitive. We had to weigh the very real possibility that our competition would get wind of the story, and with a week to go before our next edition, scoop us with the new. To the average person this may not mean much, but to those of us who deal with local news day in and day out, it’s a matter of pride in our ability to do our job, and, admittedly, ego.
We opted to wait rather than risk going with an unconfirmed story, to hold our breath and hope against hope that the story would remain below the competition’s radar for another week.
Those hopes were dashed late Wednesday when several financial news services issued a brief notice about the sale of the inn. And then Thursday morning came the final blow in the form of a faxed press release. We knew we were not the only news organization to receive it.
I scrambled, made several phone calls to confirm the fax and get some other details on the record --- from some of those same sources who would only talk off the record just a little more than 24 hours earlier --- and wrote a story which we posted on our Web page about the same time the daily newspaper put theirs up.
I continued to work on the story throughout the day, intent on confirming the identity of the buyer. I’d been told Tuesday who it was, but was unable to confirm it; the initial press release from Great American, and its spokesperson in an interview, would not say who the inn was being sold to.
By midday, I’d talked to Richard Cohen, president of Capital Properties, the company that’s agreed to buy the inn. You can read about his comments to me in the news story on page one. But now I was faced with another dilemma. Apparently, I was the only one who’d confirmed who the buyer was. Do I put the information on the Web site, thus making it public for everyone, including our competition, or hold onto it and hope against hope --- again --- that the competition doesn’t get it before our next edition comes out?
I opted to hold off, and as we go to press this Tuesday, we’ve still got an exclusive on that important piece of information.
You can see the problems a weekly deadline poses for breaking news. Even if you have the inside track on something big, there’s often little chance the daily competition won’t also have it before the next edition hits the stands.
The Web is a great tool for disseminating news, but for a weekly paper, it can be problematic. We’ve wrestled with the idea of doing a mid-week update, but have yet to agree on criteria for the types of stories we’d highlight. We don’t want to tip our competition off on what we’re working on, nor do we want to remove any incentive for reading the print edition. As newspeople, we relish the idea of getting the story first and getting it out there. Yet the dilemma: do we hold something back if we have an exclusive, or share it with our readers on the Web as soon as possible?
A daily paper or a Web-only service doesn’t have to deal with these concerns. We’ve built up our Web site considerably, but the paper is still our bread and butter. We’re not a blog and we’re not a gossip site, so we still have to adhere to basic journalistic tenants, such as getting confirmation on the details of a story.
Did we make the right decisions in the case of the CBI story? I think we did. What do you think?