Scoops and credit
In some comments and blog posts, people have expressed surprise that we would give credit in print to Ben Holder and the Rhino for publishing the city memos in question.
If you buy the idea that bloggers can be investigative journalists -- and I do -- then it's natural that a blogger could obtain confidential documents. In the old days, said blogger might have taken his find to the newspaper. Now the blogger can publish them himself.
Because the actual existence of one of the documents became a major part of the story, its publication by anyone else makes it newsworthy. In the short term at least, the publication of the two memos became a bigger story than the actual content of the memos, thanks to the city's response. It would have been a journalistic mistake to leave Ben and the Rhino out of the story.
The tone of the comments suggests that we should be embarrassed that Ben got them and we didn't. Sure we would have liked to have had them -- that's why we asked for them. But in this business you learn quickly that stuff happens, and you move on pretty quickly. Consider what we did in print the equivalent of a link online.
In the new world of digital media, scoops don't last long and sometimes scarcely exist in people's minds. We report a scoop today, put it online and send it to AP tonight. AP puts it out on the wire at midnight. TV picks it up and broadcasts it beginning at 5 a.m. before most of our papers with the scoop have even hit a driveway. Who had it first? Doesn't mean that we don't try to get them, just that they don't mean what they used to.
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