Come across a terrific news story these days and you’re all but certain to find somewhere to publish it—that is, if you stretch publishing to include posting it on a website few people have heard of and fewer read. That’s what Michael Volpe had to do with a story he thought would rock Chicago—a story about convicted city employees continuing to draw salaries. He’d hoped for better.
A couple of equally obscure sites lifted his story without asking permission or significantly enhancing its visibility. Chicago wasn’t rocked. Volpe licked his wounds.
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On January 10, two top investigative reporters at the Sun-Times, Chris Fusco and Tim Novak, published what in Volpe’s eyes was his story. Theirs began, “Chicago, the city that works, is also the city that keeps on paying city employees long after they’re convicted of corruption.”
“Maybe,” Volpe responded, “but it does appear to be the exact same and I beat you to it by a few months.”
That’s where they want to leave this. Fusco and Novak talked to me about the reporting that went into their story, but all they wanted to say on the record about Volpe’s was a single line from Novak: “Chris and I were unaware of Mr. Volpe’s website or his story. And we have never read it.”
I asked him what the experience showed. “The media is really no different than any other business,” he replied. “It’s not what you know but who you know. Simply having an important story isn’t enough. You have to know the right people and more importantly, the right people need to know you. Obviously, that dynamic means stories will get missed.
Journalism has always consisted of two cultures—the major media preoccupied with each other, and everyone else. The Internet has made the alternate culture so vast it threatens to engulf the mainstream media. But even as the ship sinks, first class still isn’t mixing with steerage.
