This Is Staffordshire’s digital publisher David Elks has written about Help Me Investigate in the Stoke Sentinel’s ‘DaviddotElks’ column following his involvement in our investigation into corporate torchbearers. He writes:
“Collaboration is such an obvious idea because it allows people to focus on their skills, but team-work doesn’t necessarily come naturally to reporters. It should.
“For the seven years that I was a business journalist at The Sentinel, there was a constant desire and pressure to find stories which would make the front page ‘splash’.
“I would be incredibly loathed to share any tip-offs or contact information if I thought another colleague might use it to break news that I could report myself.
“But I’ve had to change my attitude as I’ve moved to reporting on the web. Why?
“Because it’s almost impossible to do everything yourself.”
We delayed our post on the photo of two corporate torchbearers Tom Foley and Christos Angelides exchanging a ‘torch kiss’ to allow the newspaper to run the story first. The story was later picked up by the Daily Mail.
I often joke that collaboration is queen: http://blog.digidave.org/2009/03/collaboration-is-queen
w00t.