Thursday, July 19, 2007

News-Leader a day late on Mid-Missouri Bank story

About two hours ago, the Springfield News-Leader, a full day after the story broke in the Springfield Business Journal, filed a story on Mid-Missouri Bank's decision to close its secondary lending division.
While I realize, the breaking news designation in the web address for the story is one that is used with every story posted during the day, it hardly seems accurate for a story posted a day after the competition broke it.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Randy,
I don't care who reported it first, because its not that big of news!Banks and mortgage companies change their direction all the time. The biggest news in the mortgage business is that the mortgage companies that provided more un-conventional home loans are leaving the business. Now, that's a story.
Did it ever occur to you that the SNL reporter responsible for that area may have been on assignment, or they were waiting for a fact-checking call?
Did the Business Journal state the impact of the closure? Does it put people out of work? Are some customer's loans not going to be processed? Let's hear the whole story to see if its significant for "Breaking News".

Randy said...

I can still remember that phrase from my days at The Carthage Press. Any time The Press had a scoop on a story, the Joplin Globe usually would act as if the story wasn't much of a story anyway and perhaps sometimes it wasn't. But one of those stories the Globe did not follow up on was the investigation into Robert Dupont and his Guest Houses. If the media had followed that story, perhaps the deaths at the Anderson Guest House last November would never have occurred. As for the Mid-Missouri Bank story, it would have been easy enough to have called and confirmed the basic details and perhaps come up with something new, and in this day and age when news can be posted on the internet and does not have to wait for the next print deadline, it is important to get information out in a timely fashion. The other information can be obtained for follow-ups.

Anonymous said...

Did you read the story from JBJ? The release from Mid-Missouri was Tuesday - then why the delay?
I don't think that the closure of a external mortgage company is going to place people's lives in danger like the Guest House. And why didn't the CP follow-up?