Tips, leads and scoops

Wherever I go, I see news happening.  Sometimes it’s right in my own office.  Sometimes it’s in the building I work in, across the street, across town, or at my own home.  You never know where news will happen, but when it does, you can bet I will be on the phone to one of my best friends, who just happens to be a journalist.  I always wanted to be a journalist, so these days, I live vicariously through Mark.  I am a news monger, can never get enough of it.  But the most important part of being a good journalist is getting all angles of a story.  There is nothing worse than a half assed article written by a lazy or biased journalist who wants to report the story first, instead of reporting it correctly.  That’s where I come in.  If I know any more information that would make a story truthful, or shed a different angle on a story, I will call Mark.  When a prominent figure in my office was arrested on domestic assault charges, the paper ran a story on what had happened.  I knew what REALLY happened, so I called Mark, anonymously- it was before we became friends through his blog.  It was the first time I had ever called a reporter regarding a story, and at first I was afraid of talking too much and people reading the article would figure out who his source was.  But he never gave me up and I began to trust him.  I told him more and more of what had happened.  He handled the story so well, people got to know what really happened without being able to figure out where he got his information from.  Since I have always had a knack for being in the right place at the right time, I somehow knew we would become fast friends.  And sure enough, it keeps happening.  I have called Mark when we watched a bank robbery from my office window.  I called him again when some man was running around with a loaded gun near my office and we were all put in lockdown.  Then, on another occassion, I called him because of a propane gas leak in my neighborhood, and wouldn’t you know it, it was MY house!  I could go on and on, but that’s a whole other blog….It’s hard to choose the biggest reason I call Mark first, but it’s pretty exhilirating when you know you can give a scoop to someone and read about it in the newspaper the next day.  Whenever I see something newsworthy, I can’t wait to call him and let him know what is going on.  It’s a huge rush knowing that I may have seen something or know someone who knows the dirt on a story.  It’s the best feeling to know that you can give another side of a story so that the reader knows what really happened.

– No name, No Town