Sunday, January 20, 2019

How news worked

Readers who noted the death of Kevin Ruane might appreciate this letter, unashamedly lifted from the London Review of Books, from former BBC Foreign Duty Editor and Occasional Man in Moscow, Graham Webb....

BBC World Service news editors have always reacted with terror when they realise they might actually have a scoop. When I worked in BBC News and Current Affairs in the 1970s I was aware of one correspondent who repeatedly had scoops that External Services (radio) news editors were too nervous to touch. This was the Moscow correspondent Kevin Ruane, who died a few weeks ago at the age of 86. He had such good news sense and mastery of Russian that he got stories from Soviet dissidents no other journalist had. The rule was that if a BBC correspondent or reporter had the story, the desk should run it; it did not require the otherwise statutory confirmation from an independent ‘second source’. Despite this, Bush House news editors would always chicken out and decline Ruane’s scoops. His tactic became systematically to give his scoops to the Daily Telegraph’s Moscow man Richard Beeston. When the early edition of the Telegraph landed on the World Service news desk, Ruane was rung up by the next shift and asked if he could match Beeston’s dispatch; as its source, he obviously could, and did so immediately. If the news editors had been doing their job the story could by then have been running on all BBC outlets for many hours.

Graham Webb
Saint-Mandé, France

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