Scooper & Scooped: Local Edition

We don't normally pay that much attention to the local daily news. Not in a professional way—it's too much work for too little reward, and we're constantly annoyed at how the paper has become more about pictures and graphics than about actual news stories.

But certain broad cultural trends had us interested in seeing the newsroom flick "All The President's Men" the other day, and it was fun to see Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford on the phone so much. Newsrooms, from what we hear, are intensly competitive places. If you work at the Washington Post, you first read your own paper to see who among your collegues have been favored by the makeup editors, and you keep a daily calculation of a wide variety of grudges and jealousies. Next, you read the New York Times, for a broader, more ecumenical kind of self-loathing and professional jealousy. And if you get scooped by the New York Times, you go to the bathroom and splash cold water on your face and you curse loudly, and you wonder if you're in the wrong business.

We couldn't help noticing in all the national hype about the alleged Chai Vang murders—Fox News! LA Times!—that BOTH of our hometown papers really got scooped in the embarrassing way. Yesterday, a New York reporter at the Times published a story that had a number of local Hmong sources saying Chai Vang was, in fact, a shaman in his St. Paul community—a widely respected religious leader among his people who on more than one occasion has performed intense religious rites to exorcise evil demons from those who require such services.

It became painfully clear that no one at either Twin Cities newspaper had actually picked up the phone and talked to anyone in Vang's extensive circle of friends, relatives, and acquaintances. Judging from Stephen Kinzer's story in the Times, it was the worst kept secret in the St. Paul Hmong community. So how did the Star Tribune and the Pioneer Press manage to not overhear this bizarre and interesting news?

What's even more interesting to a layperson like ourselves is that neither paper has, at this point, acknowledged that contribution to our understanding of who this controversial figure is. (Today's Star Tribune has the groundbreaking scoop that Vang had a warrant out for his arrest on previous trespassing charges. Yawn. And Todd Nelson, at the Pioneer Press, does talk to friends and relatives, and writes a nice profile of Vang—but this is basically what you'd call a rear-of-the parade followup story to the Times which does not acknowledge whose shit it was that the Pi-Press was shoveling a day late.)

Also, it is not uncommon for the Star Tribune or the Pioneer Press to reprint stories from the New York Times—but they're not doing that with this story. Why? Probably because it would make both papers look pretty stupid to have a local story reported better from some desk in Manhattan.

Like we say, we're just casual observers. We're not in the news business per se, so we don't wish to cast aspersions. We will, though, toss the inky wretches a freebie here: If you read to the end of the Times piece, you might notice that a person named Noah Vang was credited with local reporting from St. Paul. Is this the same Noah Vang who was indicted on murder charges last year, in a Hmong after-bar knife incident?—The Editor in Cheese