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by Scott Hollister, editor |
In pursuit of a big story
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Breaking news stories don’t often land on our desks in the world of association publishing. Oh sure, we get our fair share of big stories — John Deere’s purchase of Lesco comes to mind, for example — but for the most part, you’re not going to hear a lot of “stop the presses!” coming out of GCSAA headquarters in Lawrence, Kan.
That changed, at least for awhile, on an early Wednesday morning in late June when the closest thing we see to breaking news fell into our laps — Tim Moraghan, a USGA employee for two decades and that organization’s longtime director of championship agronomy, was out of a job.
How we went about confirming this story and eventually becoming among the first to report on it, via the GCM blog (http://gcm.typepad.com) — to give credit where credit is due, golf blogger Chris Lewis (http://chrislewisgolfblog.typepad.com) beat us to the initial punch by a few hours on June 27 — is a pretty decent snapshot of how we do business here at GCM.
We first got the word from a few “friends of GCM” who were on the ground in North Carolina at the U.S. Women’s Open. A fixture around previous USGA championships, Moraghan’s absence was conspicuous at Pine Needles, and these sources were indicating that he and the USGA had parted ways.
We trusted these reports, but wanted independent verification before we published anything. The most obvious way to do that was to go straight to the sources and seek comment from the USGA and Moraghan. However, we anticipated both would be tight-lipped, and we were right — USGA media officials declined comment and Moraghan was unavailable.
So we went to Plan B — tapping other “friends of GCM” to see what they were hearing. We ended up breaking the news to some (we heard, “Wow!” followed by a few seconds of dead silence on more than a few occasions), getting off-the-record confirmation from others and plenty of “no comments, at least not right now.” It wasn’t much, but it was more than enough to make us comfortable in posting our first report to the blog early on the afternoon of June 27.
We still wanted more, though, so it was time for Plan C. By this point, we had learned that USGA staff had received a memo about Moraghan’s departure, the elimination of the championship agronomy position and a plan to use regional Green Section agronomists in that role at future championships.
This was new information that warranted a follow-up story, but before running with it, we needed to confirm the contents of that memo. It took awhile — Golfweek and CBS Sportsline actually posted online reports shortly before we got our second story on the blog — but we eventually got that confirmation, and Senior Associate Editor Seth Jones’ story was posted early on the afternoon of June 29.
It’s no Watergate, but in this business, you take what you can get, and I was proud of our staff’s efforts in nailing down this story. You can read much more about Moraghan’s departure in this month’s Front 9 section on Page 28.
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