A supporter wears a recall button as he listens to former British Columbia Premier and Fight HST leader Bill Vander Zalm announce the group's plans to try and recall B.C. MLA's during a news conference in Vancouver, B.C., on Monday September 20, 2010.DARRYL DYCK
The comments section on globeandmail.com stories are often rich with critical and interesting observations. On Thursday in British Columbia, they also proved their worth in terms of pushing the news forward.
A short story on Elections BC's rejection of a recall application from the anti-HST campaign was deluged with comments. The application had been turned down due to a rule regarding word count.
Checking out the conversation, I stumbled upon one reader comment pointing out a possible discrepancy over when the details of the word count rule had been posted to the Elections BC website.
Following up on the tip in the newsroom led to today's scoop.
Here is the editor's note we appended to the story:
From Globe British Columbia Editor Patrick Brethour
What do you think?
Those four words are becoming increasingly important in the Globe newsroom, as the BC bureau's experience Thursday with the HST recall application story demonstrated in striking terms - a great example of how our readers gave us an valuable lead in developing a breaking news story.
Courtesy of the Canadian Press, we had a story online pointing out that Elections BC had denied the Fight HST recall application because it was over the 200-word limit. Every news organization in Canada had that story as well. But then our BC online editor, Fiona Morrow, noticed this comment posted on the CP story.
logitack 12:25 PM on November 25, 2010 "It is interesting how Craig, CEO of electionsbc, has conveniently created documentation in support of his decision to deny the application. The pdf file from the electionbc web site called, Number of words in proponent statement, http://www.elections.bc.ca/docs/rcl/Word-Count-Proponent-Statement.pdf has a creation date of November 24, 2010 at 2:50:12. If you look at the index file, http://www.elections.bc.ca/docs/rcl/ the creation date is also 24-nov-2010 at 16:51. Makes you go, hmmmmmm.."
It made us go hmmmmm, too. Reporter Sunny Dhillon took this lead and developed it, resulting in a story that laid bare what had happened: Elections BC rejected the application as too lengthy - using rules that were drafted after it received the application. The result was an important (and exclusive) news story, one that would not have been possible without that initial smart question from logitack.