What is an exclusive story? What passes as exclusive? Almost every story these days is labelled as exclusive. Take the Asia Cup in Dubai. The Indian team arriving for training is a common visual. There is nothing exclusive about it. Never will be. Whichever journalist is there in Dubai will get the visual. There is no extra effort needed except the legwork to be there. And yet, you see a few platforms and it is mentioned as first and exclusive. This is plain nonsense to be honest and it is where the media starts to lose credibility.
The other distinction that ought to be made is between exclusives and one-on-ones. A player speaking to multiple journalists separately is in fact a one-on-one interview. It isn’t an exclusive and shouldn’t pass as such. For every aspiring journalist, these are distinctions they need to keep in mind. You can indeed speak to a player one-on-one and it is indeed a job well done. But if the same player speaks to others in the fraternity on the same day and as a continuum, is isn’t an exclusive.
These qualifications are crucial for journalists. It helps people chase excellence and also know that it isn’t always easy to get an exclusive. Rather, it is mighty hard. And not everyday will you get one. People who just randomly put things out as exclusive aren’t really journalists. These are sensationalists, masquerading as journalists and should be treated as such. They mislead viewers or readers and don’t really help the profession.
With social media, this is a trend that has now turned alarming and needs to be monitored. For, in the end, it will harm the profession. If youngsters tend to think that Exclusives come that easy, they will never have the determination to chase a story. And that’s where we as a collective lose out. Hard work has no substitute and it is essential that we remind ourselves that resorting to short cuts for quick numbers won’t really help in the long run.
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