Today a scoop usually means stumbling on a story or digging through data to piece together a picture no one has seen before — in short, luck or grunt work.
In the old days, scoops meant an adventure, beating the competition although everyone knew what might happen.
The recent death of Sir Edmund Hillary moved the London Times to recount how its James (now Jan) Morris outwitted "ruthless and unremitting" competitors to report the 1953 conquest of Everest.
The Times co-sponsored the expedition, and bought exclusive rights to the story. Morris was the sole journalist on the mountain. Other reporters lurked in Katmandu to intercept his dispatch and spoil any scoop.
Morris' code confounded them; reported failure meant success. His message said, "Snow conditions bad stop advanced base abandoned may twentynine stop awaiting improvement stop all well." London knew that meant, "Everest Climbed — Hillary Tenzing, May 29." That scoop shared Page 1 with Queen Elizabeth's coronation.
The Times also purchased exclusive rights to the 1922 discovery and opening of Tut's tomb. Competitors' failed to spoil its scoop. As the Times says, "Behind that familiar story lies another, untold tale worthy of Evelyn Waugh's (satirical novel) Scoop: a story of newspaper skullduggery in a foreign land, chequebook journalism, feuding, drunken hacks, secret codes and fantastic expenses claims. It is a story of archaeologists working underground to unearth the most beautiful and sacred treasures, while above ground journalists slugged it out in an unholy media scrum."
Similarly, everyone knew Dr. David Livingstone was in Central Africa but no one had heard from him for years. Henry M. Stanley's 1871 discovery of the missionary provided a scoop for The New York Herald that hired him to find him alive or dead.
Curmudgeon notes:
