Skip the middle men and just start leaving shit in insecure places you want the press to get, I say.

Story time about how much our media sucks:

2007, I was working for a small local television station in Washington state. Governors election between Christine Gregoire and Dino Rossi. Through rummaging around on reddit, I found a lawyer with evidence that Rossi had illegally been accepting large donations from the Master Builders Association.

This was direct from the lawyer and court documents. I printed up copies and put them on every newsies desk, since I was just News Production, and not a “journalist” myself.

I’ll never forget our Producer talking to me about it, and how she “hadn’t seen anything about it on the AP newswire” so she wasn’t sure about it being true. I pointed out these were court documents and asked “have you ever heard of ‘breaking a story?’”

We would not run the story until two weeks later, when the story had finally been picked up by the AP newswire… then we finally ran the story. Doing your own research as a journalist? That’s outside the job description apparently.

This is up there with when NASA was going to be testing Lunar Rovers two hours away and our journalists were like “isn’t that outside of our coverage area?” Still photos of the lunar rover testing were the top story on wired.com internationally for a month afterwards. I guess the whole world was outside of our coverage area.

Anyway, this is the kind of thinking you’re working against. Don’t break a story, don’t go outside your “coverage area.” These stories from me are almost 20 years old but I don’t expect for the television industry to have gotten smarter since then.

So leaving the documents for them to find can easily result in those documents just getting memory-holed unless they show up on the AP newswire.