Check it Out!: Great Reporters on What It Takes to Tell the Story

8. WIREITIS (Y-er-eye?-tis)

Get it first, but first get it right. slogan on a wire service ruler WIREITIS (Y-er-eye?-tis) han infectious newsroom diseaseh A h, the clangor and clamor of a major metropolitan newsroom. The clattering of the wire service machines. The ratcheting sound of typewriter carriages flying back and forth. The squawking of police radio monitors and two-way radios. And the phones. The constant jangle of the phones. All of it masked by a cloud of smoke so thick you could cut it, and the occasional yell of “Who took my ashtray?” Fingers stained by tobacco and carbon paper. How sweet it was. And my, how it has changed. Of course, for more than a century, news organizations have depended on news dispatch agencies and, later, telegraph and wire services to bring them the news. Around 1846, a man named Daniel Craig ran a pigeon agency based in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He would have small boats waiting to pick up the London papers from ships making the London to New York run. He’d pick out the best stories, rewrite them cryptically, and dispatch his pigeons, which could fly to New York faster than the ships could get there. Even the New York Sun had a flock of news pigeons for a few years. In fact, around 1850, Paul Julius Reuter organized a carrier pigeon fleet to transmit news dispatches around Europe. In 1851, after the telegraph came along, Reuter founded the news agency Reuters. The tele8 wireitis (y-er-eye?-tis) g 97 graph became the news transmitter of choice (you didn’t have to feed it), and the clucking of pigeons gave way to the clicking of telegraph keys. Reuter set the standard for what would become the wire services of today when he sent the following memo:1 to: Agents and Correspondents from: P. J. Reuter date: 1883 re: Please cover the following: “. . . fires, explosions, floods, inundations, railway accidents, destructive storms, earthquakes, shipwrecks attended with loss of life, accidents to war vessels and to mail steamers, street riots of a grave character, disturbances arising from strikes, duels between and suicides of persons of note, social or political , and murders of a sensational or atrocious character.” It is requested that the bare facts be first telegraphed with the utmost promptitude, and as soon as possible afterwards a descriptive account, proportionate to the gravity of the incident . Care should, of course, be taken to follow the matter up.” Throughout time, carriers of news have always raced to be first. It probably dates back to the fastest cave carvers or the fastest minstrels, who would rush from village to village to sing their songs of news. Today it’s who has a speed dialer on their cell phone with an integrated Internet connection. Everyone wants to be first. Sometimes that can be a deadly trap. Witness the cub reporting of the not-yet-CBS News correspondent Charles Kuralt, who remembered this old chestnut emblazoned on rulers used to cut wire copy from the International News Service. It was there to see every time you went to the clacketty wire machine to retrieve some new copy, and it said, “Get it first, but first get it right.” Kuralt, of course, had a story to go with that quote. I don’t know how we got on the subject, but we were talking about the dumbest things we ever did. 1 Memo reprinted on www.reuters.com during observance of the 100th anniversary of Paul Julius Reuter’s death in 1899. 98 g check it out! The dumbest thing I ever did was before I got into television. It was while I was editor of the college paper. I was also the AP [Associated Press] stringer2 in Chapel Hill, and we had a murder-suicide on campus. I couldn’t find out anything on the phone, so I went running over to the hospital to get the story. The young man who had been shot was indeed dead, and a nurse in the hall told me that the other guy, who had shot himself afterward, had also just died. So I filed that to Raleigh and the AP ran it on the “A” wire, nationwide. A murder-suicide in Chapel Hill. The only flaw was that the kid who had shot himself—he did die, but he hadn’t died yet when I put that out. The story...