Week in Review

Media food chain

During my vacation in Canada earlier this month, a cousin asked me where we find the stories that appear in our newspaper.

It is a question that must occur to a lot of our readers. It’s a huge world populated by billions of people, after all, and we are only a handful of reporters and editors.

I told my cousin that a lot of what we call “breaking” stories — dramatic, unexpected events — first appear in local reports and work their way up the media food chain.

“Suppose someone went haywire in the town up the road here and killed 27 people in the street with an automatic rifle,” I told him.

“The first people to be called in would be the Ontario Provincial Police and before long their police radio would be humming with their conversations.

“Some radio or TV reporter in Kingston” — the nearest major city — “would almost certainly be monitoring the police calls and get on the air right away with the news.

“From there, the story would get picked up by the Canadian Press” — the main Canadian wire agency — “and be flashed out to newspapers, TV and radio stations all over the country.

“The CP, meanwhile, shares its news with the Associated Press in the United States, so within minutes we would be seeing the story in Washington on our AP wire feed.”

It doesn’t always work that way. A great deal of the news we report is anticipated, making it possible to put a reporter in place before the event.

Summit meetings and major international conferences, for instance, are scheduled well in advance, allowing reporters from any number of countries to book flights and hotel rooms and be there when the meetings begin.

At the highest level, officials like President Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice bring their own press retinues along on the airplane when they set out on major trips.

An event like the annual Group of Eight economic conference, as a result, is always inundated with reporters from all over the world.

We also try to base our reporters in places where we think news is likely to happen. Foreign correspondents are almost always based in a country’s political capital because that is where the biggest stories usually break.

Ferry sinking

Some years ago, when I was working for an international wire service in the Philippines, we had a large staff of local reporters. One of them sat all day at the army headquarters, another at the national police headquarters and yet another at the presidential palace.

Most days, they would play cards with the other reporters or do nothing at all. But once in a while an official would come out and announce some news development or other. The reporter would phone it in to the bureau, and a senior correspondent would put it out on the wire.

But even there, we would pore through the dozen or so daily newspapers every morning and monitor the local radio stations, which had reporters in many places that we did not.

I recall covering the bureau one Sunday morning when a Philippine assistant told me a Tagalog-language radio station was reporting that a ferry had sunk. I told her to call the Coast Guard and the ferry company and went back to reading the papers.

A little while later the reporter came back to me. “Well, the Coast Guard confirms that the ferry sank and the ferry company says there were about 1,500 people on board,” she said.

Stunned, I leaped to the computer and began banging out a story while the reporter rushed down to the ferry dock in Manila, where the first survivors were being brought to shore.

Because of the 12-hour time difference, it was still Saturday evening back in the United States. The story appeared the next morning in Sunday papers all over this country.

David W. Jones is the foreign editor of The Washington Times. His e-mail address is djones@washingtontimes.com.