Eventually the story would spill over into the regular media.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
What they will do is, you know the tabloids. They'll take one element of a story that may be true and they'll build everything around it. Take a picture and invent a story around it.
I would like to point to the extraordinary lengths the mainstream media will go to maintain a sensationalist story.
Once I've discovered the story, I might restructure it, maybe move things around, set up a clue that something is going to happen later, but that happens much later in an editorial capacity.
My inclination, as an old-school, classically trained journalist, is not to go with a story unless I have it hard. It's not good enough to say something based on rumors that were flying around.
That's always been my test for what makes a story: is this something journalists would gossip with each other about?
In journalism I can only tell what happened. In fiction, I can show it.
With 24-hour news... the story moves on with the media.
God, newspapers have been making up stories forever. This kind of trifling and fooling around is not a function of the New Journalism.
I don't think, as a journalist, I'd ever get a story written. I'd probably spend five years researching it, and by the time I'd finish it, no one would be interested in it anymore.
I think we've broken story after story that the rest of the media refused to break even when they had the story because they were scared of the story, or they just didn't think it was appropriate.