Doing well and beating the opposition was ingrained in us

I totally agree with Rodney Pinder's and others' comments on “Reuters being first and right”.

Like many others during that time in the 1980-90s, the Colombo bureau was focussed on getting it right and fast and news breakers were the order of the day, our staple diet. The first item on the agenda as we started our workday was to look gleefully at one single message from - at that time - Asia headquarters in Hong Kong on alerts and snaps and how Reuters had fared against the opposition. A great day - if the bureau had beaten other agencies on a developing story - was celebrated with a beer at the local bar, and mind you that didn’t come from the expense account!

Doing well and beating the opposition was ingrained into us, there was no prize for it. We were pummelled, pushed, prodded and at times had disagreements but in a productive way. On one particular developing story - when Sri Lankan president Ranasinghe Premadasa was killed by a suicide bomber - we lost the timings on the first break (there were no mobile phones and we used a pager which didn’t work on that particular occasion) but recovered quickly and on the overall story won on timings and news breaks.

At the end of the day, week or end of year, there were no bonuses, just a pat on the back and exhilaration at the bureau that we had done well. 

In later years and today, this is the kind of speed with accuracy that I instil in my staff at a local newspaper that I work for when filing stories to the website. That's the kind of discipline today's reporters need. ■