Publish
Friday, September 26th, 2008Life in the training world has been a little quiet of late, so it’s enabled me to catch up with friends whom I haven’t seen for a while.
The basic journo concept of keeping in touch with contacts never goes away. But when people like Tony Loynes (editor-in-chief of Press Gazette), Steve Buckley (Emap’s head of TV ventures) and Mel Nicholls (Autocar’s editorial director) tell you things, you can’t think: “Great story! I’ll write that!”
It’s an interesting ethical point that journalists often raise on courses: what do you do when a good contact tells you a great story, but you know it will get him/her in trouble if it appears in print?
Publish and be damned is all very well as a principle. But in practice, it loses you friends very quickly. An MP friend often runs things past me, asking what the implications are. Many are terrific stories, but the whole thing’s done on trust.
Occasionally, I ask him to give me an entrée to people or places. All that would go if I sought the route of quick glory. The long-term benefits of the relationship are far greater.
To be fair, these are easy decisions. The tougher ones for journalists are, typically, those stories acquired when alcohol loosens tongues. We’ve all been there: you’re at a dinner or conference, it’s 12.30am and the person next to you, who’s become your new best friend, blurts out something that he or she would never have told you when sober.
You check it out. It stands up. To write, or not to write?
I had a news editor once who deliberately and calculatingly went out with the chief press officer of the main organisation in the industry just to get stories. For him, it would have been an easy decision. But for those of us who don’t ascribe to the Sun reptile style of reporting, there’s no black-and-white answer.