Sometimes, the most amazing stories just fall into your lap. NJ Burkett, a reporter at WABC-TV in New York, says a viewer phone call led him to a story about a trail of personal information found in the street on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
I learned about the story when Burkett tweeted that he was on to something.
In newsvan now in Manhattan working on a maddening story about a real estate firm that apparently left its trash unsecured on the street…
Now I’m calling people, “Hi, this is NJ Burkett. I found your name in the middle of Columbus Avenue along with your 401k statement…”
Wasn’t it risky to make that information public while still reporting the story? Not really, says Burkett.
I didn’t put the name or address of the firm on Twitter because I know for a fact that several of my competitors (including at least one New York market news director) are following me.
He also held off on his Twitter posts until the mess was largely cleaned up and “the exclusive was in the bag,” so his Tweets served more to promote the story than to reveal it.
By that time, he was setting up interviews with people whose names were on the documents found in the street. Or at least, he was trying. Burkett says many of the people he contacted thought he was a scam artist, pretending to be a reporter to talk them out of their personal information. Here’s the story Burkett aired.
One of the people whose information was found in the street was a doctor in Arizona, who finally agreed to be interviewed the next day.
At that point, Burkett reached out to ABC’s Phoenix affiliate, KNXV. He shared his video and script with reporter Tony Arranaga, who did the interview, sent it to New York, and then aired his own story.
Adapted from: Advancing the Story
